Lev Lazinskiy

R1D43 Getting Hands Dirty with Apex

I started my Salesforce Trailhead journey so that I could solve real problems that we have on my team. I took everything that I learned over the last few weeks and started working on one of those problems.

Like most things in life, everything looks very simple when you see it presented in a tutorial format, and then when you start to get in the weeds things become a bit more complicated.

The problem that I am trying to solve is to send some data to a third party service any time a deal closes. This requires thinking about a few things.

1. Ensuring validation when the state of an opportunity changes to closed won.
2. Firing off an event when that happens.
3. Taking the data from the opportunity and formatting it properly as JOSN to send to the third party system.
4. Find all the files attached to the opportunity (this turned out to be a rabbit hole of epic proportions.)
5. Firing off the HTTP POST to the third party system. This includes figuring out some sane way to store the token safely.

Notably:

• Very handy JSONGenerator class that makes it very easy to create well formatted JSON objects.
• Static typing takes some getting used to.
• Apex does not support multiline string formatting out of the box so you have to do things the old fashioned way.

String descriptionTemplate = 
  'Account Name: {0}\n' + 
  'Account Email: {1}\n' +
  'Plan: {2}\n' +
  'Plan Description: {3}\n' +
  'Invoice Amount: {4}\n' +
  'Invoice Frequency: {5}\n';