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.
- Ensuring validation when the state of an opportunity changes to closed won.
- Firing off an event when that happens.
- Taking the data from the opportunity and formatting it properly as JOSN to send to the third party system.
- Find all the files attached to the opportunity (this turned out to be a rabbit hole of epic proportions.)
- 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';I am looking forward to wrapping this up and moving on to the next, slightly more complicated problem that I am trying to solve with Salesforce.
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