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Getting Started with Salesforce Wave

Introduction

Salesforce Wave, aka the Analytics Cloud, was the major new product launched at Dreamforce 14. Over the last month or so I’ve had a chance to try it out, thanks to the MVP program and the fact that I work for BrightGen, a Salesforce Platinum Partner here in the UK.

Setting Up

Setting up Wave is straightforward, mostly setting up and assigning permission sets, and covered in detail in the Salesforce Help.

Loading Data

Obviously its rather difficult to use an analytics product without data, and Wave provides a number of mechanisms to import your data.  For the purposes of this post I’m ignoring the ETL providers (Informatica, Jitterbit, Mulesoft etc), instead I’m focusing on those provided by the platform or tools created by Salesforce.

The product is still pretty new, so there isn’t a particularly fancy UI for loading data yet, although I’m sure this will be coming shortly.  Personally, this is the way I prefer things - I’d much rather get access to the functionality as soon as I can, rather than waiting for a funky user interface. 

Importing a CSV File 

The simplest way to load data is to import a CSV file. A good source of sample data is the Government Statistical data sets page. In this post I’m using the Land Registry Price Paid current month data, which provides 87,000 rows of data (Data produced by Land Registry © Crown copyright 2014). This only contains the raw data, so I need to add a header row at the top of the file based on the column headers. The first few column headers are shown below:

 

 Navigate to the Analytics app home page and click the Create button and choose Dataset from the drop down (there might be other options depending on your permissions):

from the resulting page, choose the CSV option:

and select the file to upload :

Note that the upload section also mentions a JSON Metadata File - this is optional, but without it each column in the file will be assumed to be a dimension, which means that I’ll only be able to show the record count matching particular criteria, whereas I’m more interested in prices - for example, the total amount paid per county or the average for postcodes near me.  Providing a schema file allows me to specify that the price column contains a measure by setting its type to ’Numeric’:

 

The full schema file can be accessed here. (I didn’t create this by hand, in case you were wondering, it was auto generated by a nifty tool that I’ll cover in a later blog post once the Analytics Cloud External API is out of pilot).

Finally, I specify the name for the dataset and the application (essentially a folder) to store it in - I’ve called this ‘December_Price_Paid’ and stored it in ‘My Private App’ - which is totally private to me, much like the private workspace in CRM Content.. Clicking Create Dataset uploads the file and queues it for processing - the message says that this can take up to an hour, but much depends on what other activity is taking place. I uploaded this on a Saturday morning and it took about 3 minutes to be processed.

Exploring a Dataset

Once the data set is loaded, it appears in the list of datasets for the specified application:

Clicking on the dataset takes me to the basic view, which displays the total number of records:

Nothing particularly interesting so far, but simply clicking on the ‘Measure’ and changing this to the sum of price paid:

gives me the total spend for the month - nearly 23 Billion (did I mention the UK housing market is crazy?):

now I can start to see the real power of Wave - simply creating a grouping by County allows me to view the total spend per county in a couple of clicks and see the total spend for Essex, where I live:

I can then drill into Essex by district and change the measure to show the average price paid per property to find out how much people are prepared to pay to live here:

Now I could probably load this data into Salesforce and build out reports and dashboards to show the same data, but it would take me a lot longer than the few minutes I spent setting up this dataset and exploring it, plus if I wanted to look at the data slightly differently I’d need to build a new set of reports/dashboards, whereas with Wave I just return to the base dataset view and change my measures, grouping and filters.  

What the screen shots above don’t do justice to is the speed of Wave, so here’s a real time video showing the steps I’ve described above - its pretty impressive, I’m sure you’ll agree, especially as this is taking place over an internet connection of 4.7 Mbps:

 Note that all of the querying takes place on the server, so this involves genuine round trips - a testament to the power of the Wave query engine and the data compression that is achieved.

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Lightning Process Builder and Invocable Methods

Overview

The new Lightning Process Builder (which I’ve take to calling workflow on steroids) goes GA with the Spring 15 release, introducing a greater number of declarative actions that can be taken when a record matches specified criteria:

• Create a record (not just tasks!)
• Update any related record (not just immediate parent)
• Launch a headless flow
• Quick action
• Send an email
• Post to chatter
• Submit record for approval

If the above actions don’t cater for your particular requirements, you have the final and killer action:

• Execute Apex method

This allows you to execute custom Apex code, and once you are in Apex-land you can do pretty much anything you need to.

@InvocableMethod Annotation

In order to allow an Apex method to be executed as a Process Builder action, you need to use the @InvocableMethod annotation. 

Example

Here’s an example of using an invocable annotation that I built for the BrightGen Spring 15 Salesforce Release Webinar around account validation. There are a couple of processes involved.

Process 1 - Create Validation Tasks

When an account is created that is unvalidated, send emails to key users asking them to validate the account:

Process 2 - Clean up Validation Tasks

Once the account is changed to validated, delete the task records - this involves invoking an Apex method as there is no action to delete a record (although hopefully this is something that will be introduced in a  future release):

Defining an apex action is straightforward - simply choose the Action Type of ‘Apex’, give the action a name and then choose from the available classes that contain methods annotated with @InvocableMethod:

Apex Method

The TaskUtils task contains a single method that is passed the id(s) of the accounts whose validation tasks are to be deleted, locates the validation tasks based on their name and deletes them:

public class TasksUtils
{
    @InvocableMethod
    public static void AccountValidated(List<Id> accountIds)
    {
        List<Task> tasks=[select id from Task
                          where whatId in :accountIds
                          and Subject = 'Validate Account'];

        delete tasks;
    }
}

Creating an account that is unvalidated automatically adds 2 tasks:

and updating the record to validated automatically deletes these tasks:

Comparison With Trigger

Looking again at the Apex method, there no code aside from that to locate the tasks and delete them:

public static void AccountValidated(List<Id> accountIds)
{
    List<Task> tasks=[select id from Task
                      where whatId in :accountIds
                      and Subject = 'Validate Account'];

    delete tasks;
}

To achieve the same thing with a trigger, I’d need to embed the business logic that determines whether the Validated field for the trigger accounts has been changed to true, then continue on with the code to locate the tasks and delete them.

This is less than ideal, as :

• business logic encapsulated in triggers is resistant to change. To alter the logic I need to update the trigger code in a sandbox and then deploy to production. 
• to allow an administrator to disable the trigger on demand I’d need to use something like a custom setting and add code to retrieve and check the value of the setting before continuing with the trigger code.
• Its a little less testable, as to test the trigger I have to insert a record, and there may be other trigger logic in place that affects the record, leading to more of an integration than unit test. With well-written triggers that delegate to helper classes this isn’t much of a downside, but testing the simple invocable method fits the definition of unit testing perfectly.

So would there be any reason to continue to use triggers once Spring 15 is live?  The answer is yes, for much the same reason that you might have used triggers to in place of workflow in the past - order of execution.  It’s still not possible (as far as I’ve been able to find out anyway!) to define the order in which processes for the same object will execute, whereas in triggers its straightforward to define the order that processing will take place as long as you adhere to the one trigger per object and action pattern.

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Head for the New Trails

Trailhead was launched at the Dreamforce 14 Developer keynote, and the contact has remained fairly static for the last couple of months. That all changed today with the launch of two new modules and enhancements to a number of existing challenges. In my usual selfless fashion I dived in and completed the new modules and updated challenges, so that my readers would be fully prepared to tackle them.

New Module - Data Security

The Data Security module is part of the Getting Started with the Force.com Platform trail. To my mind there are two aspects to this topic :

• Making sure that users only see the records they need to do their job. In other words, protecting data from unauthorised or unnecessary access.
• Making sure that users can see the records they need to do their job. Locking things down too tightly often results in duplicate records, as users don’t have access to the record that already exists.

In my experience this is one of the more difficult concepts for users, administrators and developers to grasp. Its also key, especially if you are planning to attempt any of the Salesforce certifications - understanding how to lock down and open up access to data forms part of every certification, from Administrator through to Technical Architect. A good understanding of the concepts will stand you in good stead for years to come.

New Module - Change Management

The Change Management module is part of the Intro to Visual App Development trail and covers both the processes and available tools for managing change in your Salesforce instance. Whether you are an administrator/developer for an end user or a consultant, this is an important topic to master. Defending your production instance from configuration or code that has not been fully thought through or tested will save you a lot of grief and rework in the long run, and your users will be grateful for a solid environment to work in.

Enhanced Challenges

When Trailhead originally launched, a number of challenges consisted of confirming that you had read and understood the information presented for 100 points. While there’s nothing particularly wrong with this, it does lead to easy points and is a little open to abuse. In the latest iteration these challenges have been upgraded to 500 points, but also require you to carry out configuration or development in your trailhead developer edition:

• Visualforce Basics - these challenges now require you to build functioning Visualforce pages tied to data in your developer edition
• Apex Testing - these challenges now require you to build working unit tests to cover code provided by the challenge. I’m particularly pleased to see this, as testing is still something that seems to confuse or scare a lot of people, judging by the cries for “help me write the test class” on the discussion boards and stack exchange

New Challenge Type

The final enhancement on the challenges front is a new type of challenge - multiple choice questions at the end of the module step to ensure you fully understand the concepts. The points on offer drop each time you try the questions and fail, and my advice would be to read the questions properly! I dropped a few points through missing the key word in a question.

Related Posts

• Trailhead - Interactive Force.com Developer Training
• Musings of a Trailheader

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