Introducing Lightning Components - Salesforce Front-end Framework: First Thoughts and Gotchas

One of the biggest announcements from Dreamforce '15 was the new Lightning user interface. For us developers, the part that would be of most interest to us is Lightning Framework – the new component-based Javascript Front-end web framework for Salesforce.com. From going through the Developer's Guide for the Lightning Components, here are my first thoughts and some gotchas I found.

The Lightning Components is intended to allow developing responsive-design single-page app.  This should allow the developers to develop not only a Salesforce app that is more responsive than with Visualforce, but it should also allow us build one app that would optimize based on the client, instead of building separate app for Desktop and Mobile devices.

In terms of the structure, I found it to be quite similar MV*-based front-end frameworks such as AngularJS, Backbone.js or Ionic Framework, and if you are familiar with any of those frameworks, you shouldn't have much difficulty with it. The basic structure is that you create an app, which consists of one or more components with each component representing a section of the page. Each component then can have its own stylesheet, controller/helper scripts, and events.

Some of the main benefits I see is that because it is based on the Javascript, it should make it easier to implement custom Javascript components, such as auto-complete input box.  If you have had experience of taking over the input field with custom code in Visualforce page, you know how nightmarish of task it can become, dealing with Visualforce-specific convention regarding IDs and trying to resolve conflict between Visualforce tag and your Javascript code. Also, the UI testing and testing automation should be easier with this framework as you don't have to deal with auto-generated mark-ups from compiled Visualforce code and aforementioned ID conventions.  I would also like to mention Live Preview support in regards to testing, which you can open from Developer Console.  Finally, this will make managing your CSS stylesheet much easier as you have a separate CSS file associated with each component, instead of having to deal with either static resources or embedded CSS.

As for drawbacks, I did find a few potential issues.  One such issue may be that you have to customize the look-and-feel of every component with your own stylesheet.  One advantage of Visualforce is that it gives you a consistent look-and-feel to the Salesforce platform by default, which is lost with custom stylesheet.  Another issue I found was the file structure.  With the component-based structure, it appears to have completely different file-system structure to the rest of the Apex and Visualforce code directory structure we are familiar with.  As far as I know, you can only edit Lightning Components code from Developer Console, but I would assume it will become available in Force.com IDE and Mavensmate, and I wonder how those IDE/editros will be able to handle this rather diverging structure.

Finally, I would like to close this post with some gotchas I found while going through the Developer's Guide:

•  You can’t use Force.com Canvas apps in Salesforce1 if you enable Lightning components.
•  I think this may be the biggest issue for people looking into enabling Lightning components.
• In order to use Lightning Components, you need to register separate namespace for it.
• Some HTML tags are not supported with Lightning Components.
• Please see https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.lightning.meta/lightning/ref_supported_html_tags.htm for the list of the supported components.
• You need to create a custom tab in order to enable your component in the Salesforce1 Navigation menu.  
• Also, accessing your Lightning Component from the full Salesforce site is not supported - another major issue that I would think would be resolved before going into GA.

A Developer's Guide to Dreamforce

Another Dreamforce is upon us, and, although I won't be attending this year, I thought this is an opportune time to discuss how to use your time while at Dreamforce based on my experience from last year.

The first advice I would give to any developer attending Dreamforce for the first time would be don't try to attend all the sessions.  Rather, I would minimize the time spend on attending sessions, but try to maximize your time at the Developer Zone.  At the Developer Zone, you will have a chance to get some hands-on experience with new products and emerging technologies.  If it is anything like last year, you will also be able to drop in and listen to a number sessions that are held at the open spaces, and you can, of course, participate on the mini hackathons, even if you are not in the $1 million main hackathon.

As for the actual sessions, I would focus on attend sessions that are presented by either a developer from Salesforce or developers well-known within the community.  Googling the presenters prior to attending sessions could help you decide whether you would want to attend the given session.  I would avoid any session that is specific to a product or a panel discussion as I found most of those were more of promotional rather than educational.  One exception to this is the open developer Q&A session at the end of the conference.  Some of the sessions that I found to be on the better presented include:

• Testing and Testability
• Javascript Debugging

Another fun aspect of Dreamforce is the numerous After-party.  These are great opportunities to social and get some great free food and drinks.  However, it's pretty exclusive, so try to do some research and sign up for those as soon as possible.

Finally, if this is your first time in the Bay area, I would take the weekend and do some sightseeing.  I heard the tour to Alcatraz and Segway tour are really fun, although I didn't get to do those last year.  Also, renting bike and crossing the Golden Gate bridge is great as well.

Anyway,   if this your first time at Dreamforce, I'm sure you will have a great time, and you'll learn thing or two about Salesforce as well.

Validation, Approval Process and Testing

Two of the common sources of headache for Salesforce developer is approval process and validation.  Because these are declarative aspect of Salesforce (i.e. configured through the Salesforce user interface) with some restriction, these can be difficult to manager and migrate

With it being now migratable, many of the pain points for developing approval process in the sandbox has been removed.  However, once you activate an approval process, Salesforce removes some of the functionalities.  You can find more about these limitations here, but I found the following to be particularly difficult to deal with when you have changes in business logic and need to modify the approval process:

• You cannot delete active approval process, and you can't deactivate an approval process if there is any records that are submitted for approval (you have to hard delete those records).
• Once you activate an approval process, you can't add, delete or change the orders of the approval step even if you deactivate them.

With the validation rule, the difficulty I sometimes encounter is when trying to migrate some code and there is additional validation rule in the destination org (e.g. production or QA sandbox).  These validation rule can cause your test methods to fail in the destination org even though it has passed in the development org.  You can either create those validation rule in your development org and refactor your test methods to meet the validation rule, or if you are confident that the additional validation rule will not cause the business logic error when the new code is deployed, you can temporarily disable to the validation rule in the destination org during the migration and re-activate it afterwards.