R1D43 Getting Hands Dirty with Apex

| programming | salesforce |

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.
Outside of #4 (so far) I have everything else more or less working. I learned a whole lot about Apex doing this hands on exercise.

Notably:

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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