Apex Code Best Practices: Force.​com Multi-Tenant Architecture

Multi-Tenant Architecture

Force.​com’s foundation is a metadata-driven software architecture that enables multi-tenant applications. This paper explains the technology that makes the Force.​com platform fast, scalable, and secure for any type of application while allowing multiple tenants or Salesforce instances to co-exist. This is an important foundational concept to understand and serves to explain why platform limits are such an important part of your design.

Data and File Storage Allocations

Storage Capacity

Capacity management is sometimes overlooked when governing a Salesforce implementation. Salesforce splits storage into two main areas: data storage and file storage. Both are calculated for you based on the org edition and the number of user licenses you purchase. Use this guide to understand what storage you will be provided based on the org capacity required. Understanding, how your application usage will grow over time will allow you to build your capacity plan. Pay attention to the edition, as this will certainly impact your allocated storage. Once you have a good idea of your growth (number of records over time by month, for example) you can plan ahead and include the cost of additional storage in your resource model. Using a spreadsheet to calculate your storage needs is a really good way to plan for any future financial outlay.

Lightning Console Technical Requirements

Lightning Console Performance

This is great place to start when considering where to begin with assessing Lightning performance requirements. This is an important factor of your Salesforce implementation. How the application will respond in a browser will set the scene for your end-user experience and could therefore affect user adoption. If your Octane score is within the prescribed limits, then you know that the JavaScript engine’s performance is running well. Also review EPT, Experienced Page Time, which measures the time it takes to download and load the entire contents of a Web page.

Salesforce Developer Limits and Allocations Quick Reference

Salesforce Limits

To ensure that the Salesforce platform can operate its multi-tenant environment, all transactions must have available resources in order to execute. The way this is governed is through the application of governor limits. These limits are in place to ensure that Salesforce transactions have access to the resources they need to execute—well, as long as you are within the limits defined in the platform. Limits are there to control resource availability for all the Salesforce applications vying for processing power.

Improve Inefficient Related Lists

Related List Performance

If you have detail pages that have a large number of related list records, you might be experiencing page load performance and usability issues. Read this article for suggestions on how to improve your pages and provide the right kind of related list information while being performant.

Declarative vs. Programmatic

Declarative vs. Programmatic

When thinking about your application and how to develop it, as a Salesforce Admin / Developer, you’ll be weighing using a declarative development option versus using code to build your application. Use this resource and the associated links to help you make this decision about the right way to go. It is possible to use declarative development options and build great apps without writing a single line of code. The emphasis is on having GUI-driven app creation that can be easily maintained and supported. The key decisions here will mainly center on the following:

Cost: If the app is developed using declarative methods, this should be far more cost efficient than using code.

Time: Time to build using declarative options is more advantageous than the code alternative.

Maintenance and Support: Using code to develop your applications will also mean that on-going support and maintenance may well require a certain skillset to further develop and resolve any related issues to the app over time. This can also impact costs for the same reasons. Do you have staff in your organization that can support this codebase, or will you need to go to market to bring these skills in?

Developer Beginner

Developer Beginner – Trailhead

Here you’ll find a broad introduction to many of the key concepts and features you’ll need to understand before you begin designing and architecting apps that leverage the unique power of the Force.​com cloud application development platform. (Welcome to Trailhead—we love this educational learning platform.) This is delivered as a “Trailmix,” a collection of individual trails that will give you a firm grasp of basic development and platform-specific learnings designed to get you creating fantastic applications on the Salesforce Force.​com platform.

Enterprise Architecture: Single-org versus Multi-org Strategy

Salesforce Org Strategy

Here is a fantastic resource to help you really delve into the question that every Salesforce professional will have to deal with at some point on their Salesforce journey: Should we use a single-org or multi-org strategy to serve our application needs? Use this resource to learn about the pros and cons of multi- vs. single-org Salesforce architectures. Use these detailed criteria to help you select your company's strategy. This is particularly useful where the environment already has multiple orgs and the requirement is to consolidate. It all comes down to fundamental topics that must be considered carefully. Cost is the obvious one. The more orgs you support, the more financial impact you are going to have. But aside from cost (and as the method suggests), the issues will be about the app requirements themselves and how the application architecture will enable co-existence, the use of a common data model, and also the use of a security model that’s not prohibitive against the original intent of the application’s use case.

Licenses Overview

Licenses Overview

This is a huge topic, but it’s at the heart of your Salesforce implementation. If you don’t consider the most appropriate license type to serve your requirements, you may find that you do not have access to the features and functionality that you need in order to be successful. For example, for Salesforce communities or Experience Cloud, if you have complex sharing and access requirements you will need to use customer community plus licenses over the standard customer community license. So, the lesson here is to enable specific Salesforce functionality for your users; you must choose the most appropriate user license for each user. To enable additional functionality, you can assign permission set licenses and feature licenses to your users or purchase usage-based entitlements for your organization.

Salesforce Features and Edition Allocations

Salesforce Features by Edition

There are many resources available that provide an overview of the Salesforce org limits. This reference provides a general overview of the limits for Salesforce features by edition. Keep this link in your favorites. It’s likely that you will need to refer to this regularly. There is an awful lot of detail to consider here, so take some time to review it, as it will undoubtedly reveal some interesting and relevant detail that you either hadn’t previously considered or were already acutely aware of.

Data Model – Object Relationship Overview

Object Relationships

When you are considering how data elements will relate to other data elements and therefore construct the overall Salesforce data model, look at this overview, which provides detail on all the relationship types that Salesforce has to offer. The object relationships in your data model will be a key part of your data model design. You need to decide if a lookup relationship will serve your needs, or perhaps a many-to-many relationship will be more appropriate; for example, you can use master–detail relationships to model many-to-many relationships between any two objects. A many-to-many relationship allows each record of one object to be linked to multiple records from another object and vice versa. This will all depend on the requirements and how the data will be represented in your model. Remember, it’s good practice to document your data model clearly and create a data model dictionary. This document will prove vital for good data model governance. Best practice would be to add clear descriptions for all objects and fields that you add. When other resources come to view the fields available in the model, they will understand the intention for creating the element and can decide if it suits their requirement or business purpose.

Considerations for Relationships

Considerations for Relationships

Now that you have a good understanding of the types of relationships on offer, review the following considerations before creating relationships between your objects.

Salesforce Naming Conventions

Naming Conventions

How to name your objects is all part of designing a data model that not only is fit for the purpose at hand but also follows a defined standard that’s enforced across your organization. Review this Salesforce Quip document, where you will find the recommended conventions for all Salesforce data elements from Apex classes and process builders to objects and fields.

Designing Dashboards and Reports for Force.​com Implementations with Large Data Volumes

Reports & Dashboards for LDV

This link provides an overview of how to design reports for large data volumes (LDVs). There’s a lot to consider here. Firstly, what is an LDV? Well, you would consider any org that has over 5 million records an LDV. So why is it important? If you have an LDV in your org then when it comes to reports and dashboards you have to consider how the data model is designed to provide optimal performance. We will cover this in more detail in the next phase, data architecture. Just be aware that if you expect your org to have millions of records across multiple objects and a complex relationship model, then creating performant reports and dashboards will be another key consideration.

Improve Report Performance: Best Practices

Improve Report Performance

Many factors can cause a report to perform poorly or to time out. The details in this link will provide a comprehensive guide for applying best practices for report performance. Concepts such as using efficient filtering, which controls how many records are returned, can increase report performance considerably.

Integration Patterns and Practices

Integration Patterns and Practices

This document describes strategies (in the form of patterns) for common integration scenarios. Each pattern describes the design and approach for a particular scenario rather than a specific implementation.

Salesforce Connect

Salesforce Connect

Salesforce Connect provides seamless integration of data across system boundaries by letting your users view, search, and modify data that’s stored outside your Salesforce org.

Setting up the Translation Workbench

Translation Workbench

The translation workbench lets you specify the languages you want to translate, assign translators to languages, create translations for customizations you’ve made to your Salesforce organization, and override labels and translations from managed packages. You can also consider the use of custom labels to simplify how you reference translated text in code. You can then create reusable elements in your code that will always display the correct language of the user. This provides a very efficient way to present text in your application’s UI.

International Organizations: Using Multiple Currencies

Using Multiple Currencies

Review this guide if your solution will require the use of multiple currencies.

Which Automation Tool Do I Use

Which Automation Tool

Salesforce provides multiple tools to automate your organization’s repetitive business processes: approvals, process builders, workflows, and visual workflows

Process Automation Cheatsheet

Process Automation Cheatsheet

A process flow chart and comparative tables make it easy to figure out which tool is best for any particular use case.

Getting Started with Approval Processes: Approval Process Checklist

Approval Process Checklist

This resource provides a checklist for preparing the appropriate information before creating your approval process.

Automate Your Business Processes: Workflow Limits

Workflow Limits

This resource provides guidance on the limits that apply to rules that are applied to objects in the platform.

Cloud Flow Designer Guide

Cloud Flow Designer Guide

Before you begin building and distributing flows, understand the best practices in the Cloud Flow Designer Guide. In addition, when designing, managing, and running flows, consider the permissions, use limits, and data issues.

Extend Salesforce with Clicks, Not Code: Quick Actions

Quick Actions

Actions enable users to do more in Salesforce and in the Salesforce mobile app. For example, you can let users create or update records and log calls directly in their Chatter feed or from their mobile device.

Automate Your Business Processes: Process Builder

Process Builder

Many of the tasks you assign, emails you send, and other record updates are vital parts of your standard processes. Instead of doing this repetitive work manually, you can configure processes to do it automatically. Process Builder helps you automate your business processes and gives you a graphical representation as you build it.

Automate Your Business Processes: Process, Limits, and Considerations

Process, Limits, and Considerations

Before you start creating, managing, and activating processes, understand the limits and considerations.

Extend Salesforce with Clicks, Not Code: Calculate Field Values with Formulas

Calculate Field Values with Formulas

Formula fields are a great way to derive a field value by performing a calculation from other fields in an object. This resource explains how they work.

Formulas Cheatsheet

Formulas Cheatsheet

Use this resource to quickly see what operators, expressions, and functions you can use with formula fields.

Extend Salesforce with Clicks, Not Code: Common Formula Errors

Common Formula Errors

Review common errors that can occur with formulas and learn how to fix them.

Extend Salesforce with Clicks, Not Code: Tips for Building Formulas

Tips for Building Formulas

This resource provides many tips for building formula fields with a plethora of different use cases.

Differences Between Files, Salesforce CRM Content, Salesforce Knowledge, Documents, and Attachments

Differences Between Files, Knowledge, Documents, and Attachments

Explore the differences between various ways to manage your files and content. Using this resource, you will see all the various options and a clear description of the differences between them.

Set Up and Maintain Collaboration Tools: The Files Connect Setup Process

Files Connect Setup Process

The setup process for Files Connect differs for cloud-based and on-premises external data sources.

Sales Productivity: Guidelines for Using Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads

Guidelines for Using Social

Review guidelines for using social accounts, contacts, and leads, including privacy and security details and which social networks are available by record and user experience.