Improve your Apex Testing Performance

It's Friday afternoon.

You just deployed a new feature to your Salesforce Org.

Something is clearly wrong with it.

Your users are complaining, your boss is calling you in panic.

You need to fix it NOW.

You open the debug log, it's a simple mistake.

You fix the error in your Apex class in just a few minutes.

You prepare the deployment package.

You wait for the package validation.

[60 minutes later], your package is ready to go.

Clearly not the Friday you wanted.

Sound familiar? I know it's happened to me more than once.

Package validation is sometimes longer than actually fixing the problem and while we have no control over components validation, we do have some control over the unit testing part of it.

Apex Testing

We do our best to cover all possible edge cases with a complete set of unit tests, but mistakes happen.

The problem is the more tests we add, the longer that package validation process takes to run. How can we make it go faster while maintaining the coverage and safety that a good set of tests provide?

My approach is to prevent as many database operations as possible in your test classes.

Step 1 - Remove logic from your triggers

Extracting business logic outside our handlers makes it easier to understand everything that is going on inside of it, but also makes it easier to design our code as reusable components.

Step 2 - Remove queries from your business logic

By writing queries directly inside your business logic, it's impossible to execute your tests without going to the database, which we want to avoid.

Step 3 - Test your querying separately

By isolating your queries from your business logic, you make your query logic reusable and testable.

Results:

Before:

Test Execution Time  705 ms Test Execution Time  660 ms Test Execution Time  535 ms Test Execution Time  593 ms

After (without insertion):

Test Execution Time  73 ms Test Execution Time  43 ms Test Execution Time  28 ms Test Execution Time  45 ms

After (with insertion):

Test Execution Time  700 ms Test Execution Time  497 ms Test Execution Time  647 ms Test Execution Time  551 ms

The test execution time when keeping everything in memory is at least 10 times faster, and the changes required to make it possible in tests has no significant hit on performance even when performing database operations.

You can try this yourself and access the code I used on Github.

Note: All my examples will be using my favorite trigger framework made by Kevin O'Hara and available on GitHub here.

TrailheaDX 2020

For this year's edition of TrailheaDX, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Salesforce transformed the event into a single day fully remote event.

The event is split into 4 separate trails: Developer, Admin, Architect, and Community/Ecosystem.

While there was too much content for one person to see in a single day, here are the announcements that caught my eyes!

Salesforce anywhere:

While chatter can be a great way to communicate within Salesforce, I think we can all agree it is limited in features but also looks pretty old. Salesforce Anywhere will probably replace Chatter in the future.

Salesforce Anywhere is a new collaboration experience, available on mobile, that allows chat, call or video call, directly from within the platform.

It is currently available in beta, but I can't wait for it to be GA.

More information here.

Data Privacy Manager:

Salesforce introduced the Compliance Data Categorization field back in the Winter '20 release. You can use that field to categorize the compliance level required for a field, whether it's a PII (personally identifiable information) or PCI (Payment Card Industry).

The Consent Event Stream will automatically track and generate events when some field with a compliance level is updated, making it easier to enforce access and update compliance on those fields.

Salesforce Code Builder:

It was announced yesterday (see Salesforce <3 Codespace) but we had the opportunity to watch a deeper demo of the new capabilities of this cloud IDE.

You can use Salesforce Code Builder, built on VSCode and Codespace, directly in your browser to code, manage and deploy your metadata, just like you would with your desktop VSCode installation.

The Salesforce Expansion Pack, a VSCode plugin made for Salesforce development in the IDE, will also get a great upgrade: a new SOQL query builder, allowing to create complete queries without coding.

Salesforce functions:

Salesforce functions were first introduced as Evergreen functions back in Dreamforce 2019 (see Dreamforce 2019)

Functions are a fully integrated way of executing code (not only Apex but also Javascript!) inside managed Kubernetes. You can, for example, use a Function from a Flow just like you would use an Invocable to run Apex. They can also be packaged and deployed like any other metadata on the platform.

Since Functions are running "outside", you don't have the usual governor limits about CPU Usage or Memory, making it possible to perform more complex tasks without leaving the trusted Salesforce platform.

I am using quotes when saying "outside" because since they are still running in the Salesforce managed ecosystem, you get all the security and compliance benefits of the platform. It's also possible to access your Org data from a Function with built-in APIs.

For those of you with experience in other Cloud Providers, you can think of Salesforce Functions as the Salesforce equivalent of AWS Lambas or Azure Functions!

Flows:

The new Flows functionality will make them the go-to automation tool on the platform. Salesforce is now allowing Flows to be triggered whenever a record is saved, or even whenever a platform event is published.

We no longer need to create a Process Builder to invoke that Flow, reducing redundancy, and making the automation more straightforward.

More information about those new features in the Summer 20' release notes.

Apex:

A few great announcements for Apex, coming most of them available in the Winter 21' release: Safe navigation operator, Finalizers and Promises, and the SOQL Fields(ALL):

Safe navigation operator: Similar to other languages syntax (like C#), Salesforce now supports the '?.' property navigator, preventing the risk of a null reference exception by returning null if an object is null along the property chain.

For example, we will be able to write something like 'Foo?.Bar?.size()' to access the size of a collection without having to perform explicit null check on any objects.

Finalizers and Promises:

Promises in Apex are a lot like Promises in Javascript, where you can chain a subsequent task using the 'then' keyword. By using promises in Apex, it becomes possible to chain multiple Queuables one after the other in sequence.

Finalizers are really just a way to handle success and errors after the execution of a queueable, making it possible, for example, to perform an outbound call in case of a failure.

It's a really great addition to the framework for resiliency and error handling.

You can learn more about Queuables in this blog post and more about Finalizers and Promises in the official documentation.

SOQL Fields(ALL):

Okay this one was introduced really fast and I couldn't find any documentation regarding that new feature, but it's super exciting: 'SELECT * FROM Foo is coming in SOQL!

Just like in standard SQL, it will be possible to select all the fields on an object without explicitly selecting them.

Miscellaneous:

Salesforce released an official Postman API Collection for most of their APIs. It's a great way to familiarize yourself with them and it's really easy to try them out with Postman.

More information available right here.

Well, that's it for this remote edition of TrailheaDX!

As always, the content was really interesting and we had the great opportunity to actually chat with some Salesforce team members to learn more and ask questions about those upcoming features. That openness and availability are really special and greatly appreciated.

Enough about my experience, what about you?

What was your favorite announcement?

Salesforce <3 Codespace

A few weeks ago, Microsoft held Build 2020, the developer focused conference, where they announced Codespace.

Codespace basically allows you to run a complete version of VSCode directly from your browser. You can customize your own Codespace, making it possible to include plugins and configurations in your virtual VSCode setup.

All by itself, it's an amazing tool to allow new developers in your team to be up and running really quickly with all the dependencies required in your IDE.

It's integrated inside Github, the popular Git repository hosting service, so you can even launch your Codespace directly from the repo.

Yesterday, Salesforce made a huge announcement by introducing Salesforce Code Builder. It's a new solution, built on Codespace, that will allow us to have a complete developer environnement in the browser with VSCode it's Salesforce plugin for VSCode.

I am really excited to get more information about this tomorrow at TrailheaDX.

If you are interested and want more detail right now, read the official announcement here!