Know the Right Use of Salesforce Sandboxes and Lightning Flow

If you are new to Salesforce or even an experienced Salesforce developer or administrator, it is not necessary that you know everything about it. People use Salesforce for a wide range of requirements, and most of them don’t go beyond their basic needs or don’t get time to explore those. However, Salesforce is actually an end-to-end platform that could do a lot of additional things to help you out with daily business operations ranging from baseline planning to end-level execution and also analysis of the return on investment.

Salesforce is an ever-growing platform, so it is important for the users to also know about the updates to reap the best out Salesforce. Learning Salesforce is not a difficult task, and also by applying a bit of logic, you will be able to explore the features too at best. Many times, it may not only be technology, but people seem to get confused with the jargon terms also which the pros tend to use. In this article, we will first discuss various Salesforce editions and the terminologies related to various Salesforce Sandboxes.

Salesforce editions

If you are new to Salesforce and planning to get one, at the first point, one should make a decision as to which edition to choose. Each edition comes with a custom set of features and functions. So, based on the nature of their business and the priorities to be set, one can choose the most appropriate Salesforce edition. To date, there are seven different salesforce editions as below:

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Developer Sandboxes

Salesforce Sandboxes is one major feature everyone should know about at the first point itself. Sandboxes will help users to custom code the applications and create various copies of it for different requirement or purposes. Sandbox could be used to develop, test, and train technical things.

Sandboxes are total remotes out of your SPO i.e. Salesforce production organization, so the process to your sandboxes does not have an effect on your Salesforce manufacturing organization, and vice versa.

Usually, in all segments of assignment calls for specific environments like for the duration of the construction section, there are possibilities to multiple groups will gather and try on improvement, in this example, each group requires their own sandboxes for development. After the development period, we want a testing field, during training length schooling group, needs a separate field for training cause and before proceeding to production one STAGING step required. For all these segment-specific fields are required.

Following SDLC diagram illustrate all the required fields below:

Sandbox Development Life Cycle

1. Create a development field.
2. Create using Salesforce local tools and Web.
3. Develop a testing field, which includes integration as well as UAT.
4. Proceed with further modifications from the development field to the integration field.
5. Testing.
6. Drift changes from the integration surroundings to the UAT field.
7. Perform user-acceptance tests.
8. Change adjustments from UAT surroundings to staging surroundings.
9. Reproduce the production changes in STAGING.
10. Fix a specific time or date to the release.

Types of Sandboxes

1. Developer: It is a true configuration of the Sandbox, which is for coding and testing the applications. In the developer Sandbox, there is an upper limit for storage and data as 200 MB maximum.
2. Developer Pro: This Sandbox lets custom configuration option for coding as well as testing with various combinations. It is ideal for the use of standalone developers in a non-shared environment. Compared to the developer version, this has a bigger storage and data capacity of 1 GB each. Otherwise, it is identical to the developer version.
3. Group: Both Developer and Developer Pro Sandboxes were for individual developers, but Group Sandbox is for groups as the name suggests. You can group a set of development and testing tasks on this in a team environment.
4. Full: It is a copy of the development environment with all application schemata and the data as the same. It comes with the same storage and data limit as the production Sandbox.
5. Partial Copy: Like full, it may also have the same schema with objects, dashboards, reports, and documents. There is a limit on storage and data as 5 GB each. A partial copy is ideal for once in a while use in business or technology testing etc.

Users can custom create sandboxes for testing their organizations, and it is possible for anyone to create Sandboxes both Lightning and Classic Salesforce versions. Next, let’s explore the Salesforce Lightning Platform, which many of the developers are new to.

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How can you create a Salesforce Sandbox Template?

Salesforce presents the provision to create Full and partial copy sandbox templates, even as the templates can’t be created for developer and developer seasoned sandboxes. Through Salesforce sandboxes person can manipulate the length of the records that he wants to replica from manufacturing to the sandbox and vice versa and pick out any particular object as well.

Below-indexed benefits are provided through the information sandboxes:

The sandbox template may be created at the time of creation. Although, the best five GB of statistics may be saved alongside five GB of documents in a partial or complete sandbox. Now we will see how the sandbox template may be created and used. This can be either a partial or full sandbox.

Below-indexed steps must be observed for putting in sandbox template:

Depending on the size of your org you may select the proper sandbox you can pick anyone. When the copying might be completed you may acquire a notification mail. You can click the link that is acquired in your mail to get admission to the sandbox loose salesforce demo if you want to add gadgets within the Salesforce sandbox template, then you’ll tick each object checkbox. The listing of the decided on items can be displayed, moreover, the items also can be deselected as well. After choosing the favored item, you may click on the store button and store the sandbox as well.

Salesforce Lightning Platform

In Force.com’s development, there are a few primary things once you need to keep a close eye on. Ensuring publishing the finished content by keeping it in the public domain. Always testing the new site for publishing simultaneously is a major challenge. Considering this aspect, Force.com has many limitations. It is ideal for a Force.com developer to know about these shortfalls too to ensure that you don’t face any complications while developing. To learn more about it, you could also look at the Salesforce trailheads and user policies. You may also consider the design models which are effective in DBMS too. The key to success here is the proper design of the schema and querying structure. With all these benefits offered together, Salesforce Lightning is now the best solution to take up your end-to-end development needs.

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The right use of Lightning Flow

As we have seen above, Lightning Flow is the hottest Salesforce tool now. It is primarily a flash-less flow builder; the developers on Salesforce with a good understanding of the Flow can be highly benefitted with its use. Here are some primary things Flow builders need to know. You can make use of the Salesforce Trailheads also to learn about the Flow. There are training materials available on the Salesforce admin portal also with expert tutorials.

You can launch Flow through the apex trigger, process builder, page layout button, and also embedded into the Lightning Component or Lightning Community. Another important thing to remember is that it is vital to format and comment on the code in order to make things easier in an ongoing development environment. Another important thing is to ensure that you mention all the objected tested by the Flow during the course of development. It is important to mention where these are involved from and which all pages are used in terms of screen Flow.

As like the standards followed in terms of programming, you also have to stick to a proper naming convention while preparing the elements or to create a variable in the Flow. One should specify all variable descriptions also as to what you must capture. Considering these, it will be worth to put some additional effort also upfront to ensure that you help yourself of anyone else working on it further during the course of the Flow. Another expert advice is to write some short blurbs also on each step to document as to what you did with it. Such an add-on step will help you to remember what was previously done when you reconsider it at a later time.

Sticking to all these inputs will ensure the right usage of the Lightning Flow. This will further make things easier and understandable during the course of development.

This article is written by Sujain Thomas. Sujain is a writer and SEO expert. Nowadays Sujain manages and writes for Flosum.com. Her primary focus is on "Salesforce DX". She is responsible for building content that helps IT professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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