Now What for Dreamforce?

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The cancellation of the in-person 2020 Dreamforce conference brought my 10 year attendance streak to a shuddering halt. I'll shortly be taking my (late) summer holiday, and it will be the first one I can remember where I'm not building applications, putting together presentations for one or more sessions, or joining conference calls to cover how round table events will be run. While it will be nice to have that time back, I'll very much miss the trip to San Francisco and the chance to catch up with a bunch of people that I rarely see in person.

We're now notionally a couple of months out from the digital version of Dreamforce, which has already been put in doubt by comments made by Marc Benioff to The Information. For what it's worth I don't think a like for like replacement of Dreamforce will take place online, nor would it make a lot of sense to do that.

Duration

Dreamforce is a 4 day event, often bookended by additional summits (think CTA) or training events (get certified for half price!). For those outside of North America it typically involves a week plus out of the office - this aspect is key - we've all flown over with not much more to do but attend the conference and network. 

For a virtual event, nobody is taking a week off work to sit in front of their screen watching presentations. The best that can be hoped for is that the audience watch some of the sessions live, fitting in around their real work. 

Location

Dreamforce takes place in San Francisco, which is a popular destination in its own right. A virtual event takes place in your own home (or possibly in an office now that some have reopened) which doesn't have the same cachet. 

Attendees are also going to be in their own timezone, rather than struggling to adjust to PST. They aren't likely to stay up until 2am to see the latest report builder enhancements, but by the same token they won't be jet-lagged and should be able to stay awake.

Networking

This is one of the biggest attractions for me - the chance to meet with a whole bunch of people from product managers, to answer burning questions, to fellow developers from the community, to find out what cool things others are working on. Hang around the Trailhead forest for a few hours and you'll be amazed how many people you can tick off your list. This just doesn't happen at virtual events - you can fire off questions via videoconference chat channels, but the one to one connection simply won't be an option at the scale you can achieve in person.

I'd also include things like parties, the Gala and after parties in the networking column, and clearly none of that is going to happen virtually. You might see some virtual happy hour concept where a group of people sip drinks and try not to talk over each other on a zoom call, but it won't be the same.

Expo

I've attended a bunch of virtual events this year, sometimes because I'm interested in the topic and sometimes just to see the approach. In my opinion, one area that consistently struggles is the expo. People dialling in from home to watch a session on a specific topic typically sign off afterwards rather than browsing a virtual expo. If you are interested in a product and know Dreamforce is coming up, you might wait to talk to the vendor in person. When you can't do that, you'll sign up for a virtual demo at the first possible opportunity rather than wait for a day when you are already going to be stuck in front of a screen for hours. There is also the swag, or lack thereof.. From personal experience, I can tell you that a surprising number of people at any event expo just want free swag, and they aren't joining your virtual expo demo without some incentive. 

This feels to me like one area that will have to be completely rethought in these continuing Covid times - simply taking the expo concept online isn't cutting it. Organisers will still want sponsor dollars, but they'll have to find a new mechanism. Some kind of session sponsorship is my guess, which showcases the partner's offering alongside the main product, in this case Salesforce. 

Community Content

This is the other area that will need to be rethought. If it will be a struggle to get people to join sessions involving product management, I really can't see Salesforce giving up space to speakers from the community. They won't have loads of breakout rooms to fill, so I can see them keeping the vast majority of virtual space to themselves. Maybe this will push the community content completely to community events like London's Calling or the many flavours of Dreamin' 

Diluting the Brand

Dreamforce is the Salesforce event of the year. It's something that everyone wants to go to and always sells out. By running something less than this online, the name is devalued. I'm sure the numbers would still be pretty good, because of the sheer reach that Salesforce has, but it would always be compared to the in person event and found wanting.

Now What?

Instead of trying to recreate Dreamforce in a virtual setting, do something different. It could still leverage the Dreamforce name, but not try to be a like for like replacement. Rather than squashing a ton of content into 4 days that we won't have time to consume, spread it out - maybe as a half-day event around a theme every month or six weeks - Dreamforce Bi-Fortnightly has a nice ring, as does Dreamforce Semi-Quarterly. The sessions need to be useful though - if they aren't the audience will vote with their feet, and they won't have the ticket cost to guilt them into staying.

The one exception to the above is the keynote. This is something that should still happen as a one-off with attendant folderol. We need this see the performance versus the previous year, the focus for the next year and some key customer stories. Also, without the keynote I won't be able to hear about the new features that I won't make the pilot for and thus won't get access to for a couple of years, and I need that envy to keep my interest up. I'm not sure how well the multiple product keynotes would work - maybe a half-day keynotes event that starts with Marc Benioff and friends, and hands over to the the various clouds, or perhaps each Dreamforce Semi-Quarterly includes a keynote and has a major focus on the specific cloud. 

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Adding IP Ranges from a Salesforce CLI Plug-in

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Introduction

I know, another week, another post about a CLI plug-in. I really didn't intend this to be the case, but I recently submitted a (second generation) managed package for security review and had to open up additional IP addresses to allow the security team access to a test org. I'm likely to submit more managed packages for review in the future, so I wanted to find a scriptable way of doing this. 

It turned out to be a little more interesting than I'd originally expected, for a couple of reasons.

It Requires the Metadata API

To add an IP range, you have to deploy security settings via the metadata API. I have done this before, to enable/disable parallel Apex unit tests, but this was a little different. If I create a security settings file with the new range(s) and deploy them, per the Metadata API Docs, all existing IP ranges will be turned off:

    To add an IP range, deploy all existing IP ranges, including the one you
    want to add. Otherwise, the existing IP ranges are replaced with the ones
    you deploy. 

Definitely not what I want!

It Requires a Retrieve and Deploy

In order to get the existing IP addresses, I have to carry out a metadata retrieve of the security settings from the Salesforce org, add the ranges, then deploy them. No problem here, I can simply use the retrieve method on the metadata class that I'm already using to deploy. Weirdly, unlike the deploy function, the retrieve function doesn't return a promise, instead it expected me to supply a callback. I couldn't face returning to callback hell after the heaven of async/await in my plug-in development, so I used the Node Util.Promisify function that turns it into a function that returns a promise. Very cool.

const asyncRetrieve = promisify(conn.metadata.retrieve);
const retrieveCheck = await asyncRetrieve.call(...);

The other interesting aspect is that I get the settings back in XML format, but I want a JavaScript object to manipulate, which I then need to turn back into XML to deploy.

To turn XML into JavaScript I use fast-xml-parser, as this has stood me in good stead with my Org Documentor. To get at the NetworkAccess element:

import { parse} from 'fast-xml-parser';

  ...

const settings = readFileSync(join(tmpDir, 'settings', 'Security.settings'), 'utf-8');
const md = parse(settings);

let networkAccess = md.SecuritySettings.networkAccess;

Once I've added my new ranges, I convert back to XML using xml2js:

import { Builder } from 'xml2js';

  ...

const builder = new Builder(
   {renderOpts:
      {pretty: true,
       indent: '    ',
       newline: '\n'},
    stringify: {
       attValue(str) {
           return str.replace(/&/g, '&')
                     .replace(/"/g, '"')
                     .replace(/'/g, ''');
       }
    },
    xmldec: {
        version: '1.0', encoding: 'UTF-8'
    }
});

const xml = builder.buildObject(md);

The Plug-In

This is available as a new command on the bbsfdx plug-in - if you have it installed already, just run 

sfdx plugins: update 

to update to version 1.4

If you don't have it installed already (I won't lie, that hurts) you can run:

sfdx plugins:install bbsfdx
 

and to add one or more ranges: 

sfdx bb:iprange:add -r 192.168.2.1,192.168.2.4:192.168.2.255 -u <user>

The -r switch defines the range(s) - comma separate them. For a range, separate the start and end addresses with a colon. For a single address, just skip the colon and the end address.

Related Posts

• The Plug-in on NPMJS
• The Plug-in Source on Github
• New bbsfdx Plug-in Cleanup Commands
• Generating PDFs with a Salesforce CLI Plug-in
• Org Documentor and AuraEnabled Classes
• Offline mobile app template plug-in Dreamforce 18 session
• Salesforce CLI Play-by-Play
• Salesforce CLI Cheat Sheet

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App Builder Page Aware Lightning Web Component

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Introduction

This week I've been experimenting with decoupled Lightning Web Components in app builder pages, now that we have the Lightning Message Service to allow them to communicate with each other without being nested. 

A number of the components are intended for use in record home and app pages, which can present challenges, in my case around initialisation. Some of my components need to initialise by making a callout to the server, but if they are part of a record home page then I want to wait until the record id has been supplied. Ideally I want my component to know what type of page it is currently being displayed in and take appropriate action.

Inspecting the URL

One way to achieve this is to inspect the URL of the current page, but this is a pretty brittle approach as if Salesforce change the URL scheme then it stands a good chance of breaking. I could use the navigation mixin to generate URLs from page references and compare those with the current URL, but that seems a little clunky and adds a delay while I wait for the promises to resolve.

targetConfig Properties

The solution I found with the least impact was to use targetConfig stanzas in the component's js-meta.xml configuration file. From the docs, these allow you to:

Configure the component for different page types and define component properties. For example, a component could have different properties on a record home page than on the Salesforce Home page or on an app page.

It was this paragraph that gave me the clue - different properties depending on the page type!

You can define the same property across multiple page types, but define different default values depending on the specific page type. In my case, I define a pageType property and default to the type of page that I am targeting:

<targetConfigs>
    <targetConfig targets="lightning__RecordPage">
        <property label="pageType" name="pageType" type="String" default="record" required="true"/>
    </targetConfig>
    <targetConfig targets="lightning__AppPage">
        <property label="pageType" name="pageType" type="String" default="app" required="true"/>
    </targetConfig>
    <targetConfig targets="lightning__HomePage">
        <property label="pageType" name="pageType" type="String" default="home" required="true"/>
    </targetConfig>
</targetConfigs>

so for a record page, the pageType property is set as 'record' and so on.

In my component, I expose page type as a public property with getter and setter methods (you only need the @api decorator on one of the methods, and convention right now seems to be the getter) :

@api get pageType() {
    return this._pageType;
}

set pageType(value) {
    this._pageType=value;
    this.details+='I am in a(n) ' + this._pageType + ' page\n';
    switch (this._pageType) {
        case 'record' :
             this.details+='Initialisation will happen when the record id  is set (which may already have happened)\n';
             break;
            ;;
        case 'app' :
        case 'home' :
            this.details+='Initialising\n';
            break;
    }                
 }

and similar for the record id, so that I can take some action when that is set:

@api get recordId() {
    return this._recordId;
}

set recordId(value) {
    this._recordId=value;
    this.details+='I have received record id ' + this._recordId + ' - initialising\n';
}

then I can add the component to the record page for Accounts:

a custom app page:

and the home page for the sales standard application:

and in each case the component knows what type of page it has been added to. 

Of course this isn't foolproof - my Evil Co-Worker could edit the pages and change the values in the app builder, leading to all manner of hilarity as my components wait forlornly for the record id that never comes. I could probably extend my Org Documentor to process the flexipage metadata and check the values haven't been changed, but in reality this is fairly low impact sabotage and probably better that the Evil Co-Worker focuses on this rather than something more damaging.

Show Me The Code!

You can find the code at the Github repo.

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Org Documentor and AuraEnabled Classes

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Introduction

In the Winter 21 release of Salesforce, access to AuraEnabled methods in Apex classes will be restricted to users with profiles or permission sets that grant access to those classes. If you've been working in a sandbox recently you've probably encountered this already, as the critical update for this was enabled on August 8th.

Figuring out who (if anyone) has access to classes isn't straightforward, as you have to trawl through the profiles and permission sets and check each one. Salesforce have created an Aura Enabled Scanner application that can be installed via an unlocked package, which checks packaged and unpackaged code, but it does require that you login to Salesforce each time you need to check things.

This seemed like a good candidate for my Org Documentor Salesforce CLI Plug-In - something that can be run on a schedule, check that any new classes used as controllers for Aura or Lightning Web Components are accessible, and show which profiles/permission sets have access.

Configuration

To add processing for AuraEnabled classes, an additional stanza is required in the configuration file passed to the bbdoc command - here's what it looks like in my example repo:

"auraenabled": {
    "name": "auraenabled",
    "description": "AuraEnabled Class Access", 
    "subdirectory": ".",
    "image": "images/auraenabled.png",
    "suffix":"object",
    "groups": {
        "other": {
            "name":"other", 
            "title":"AuraEnabled Components",
            "description": "All components with Apex controllers"
        }
    }
}

As with other metadata types, you can specify multiple groups to slice up your components into functional areas - I've lumped them all into one group as I only have one component!

Output

The index (home) page for the org report displays a new card for the AuraEnabled metadata:

An error badge is displayed if there are one or more classes used as controllers for components that aren't accessible from any profile or permission set. 

Clicking in to the details shows the groups and errors:

and clicking into the group shows the detail for each component, with classes that aren't accessible highlighted as errors:

Note that if a Lightning Web Component accesses multiple Apex classes, there will be a row for each class with the same component name in the report, as shown above.

Processing

I was quite pleased by how little code I had to write to add support for this:

• A classes map structure is created in memory, profilesAndPermSetsByClassname, where each entry has the Apex class name as a key and a value object containing lists of permission sets and profiles with access to the class. This is generated by loading all of the profile and permission set metadata and iterating the ClassAccess sections. 
  
  
• The component groups are iterated, and for each entry in the group:
  
  
• If it is an Aura Component, the controller attribute from the <aura:component/> tag is extracted
  
  
• If it is a Lighting Web Component (which can access multiple Apex classes), @salesforce/apex/ lines are identified and the Apex class name extracted. 
  
  For each class:
  
  
• The entry for the class in the profilesAndPermSetsByClassname map is extracted. If this is null or both of the profile and permission set lists are empty, the classname is added to the error collection displayed on the group page.
  
  
• A row is added to the JavaScript object backing the group page showing the profiles/permission sets that have access, adding the error highlight colour if there are none.

Plug-In

The updated bbddoc Salesforce CLI plug-in providing AuraEnabled support can be found on NPM, and the source code is available in the Github repository. 

Why not use the AuraEnabledScanner?

You absolutely should - I do, to configure access. This works with the AuraEnabledScanner rather than replacing it. As development continues, new classes and components are added to your codebase. The Org Documentor flags up any that don't have appropriate access, and you can then login to an org that your metadata is deployed to, run the scanner and fix up the access. 

The scanner also handles managed classes which the Org Documentor doesn't, as it works against your metadata on disk rather than everything installed in a specific org instance.

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• Documentation generated from the sample metadata
• Sample metadata repository
• Plug-in source repository
• Documentor Plugin - Triggers (and Bootstrap)
• Documenting from the metadata source with a Salesforce CLI Plug-in - Part 5
• Documenting from the metadata source with a Salesforce CLI Plug-in - Part 4
• Documenting from the metadata source with a Salesforce CLI Plug-In - Part 3
• Documenting from the metadata source with a Salesforce CLI Plug-In - Part 2
• Documenting from the metadata source with a Salesforce CLI Plug-In - Part 1
• Offline mobile app template plug-in Dreamforce 18 session
• Salesforce CLI Play-by-Play
• Salesforce CLI Cheat Sheet

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New bbsfdx Plug-In Cleanup Commands

Introduction

bbsfdx is my Salesforce CLI utilities plug-in. It receives infrequent updates, typically when I find myself doing the same thing repeatedly via workbench or the like. It doesn't have many functions as I try to keep it to utilities - anything new goes into it's own dedicated plug-in (e.g mentz, bbdoc, bbpdf). This week I found the need to add a couple of functions and published V1.3 of the plug-in.

New Commands

bb:devconsole:delete

When the developer console won't load, up until now I've googled for the help article and followed the instructions to remove the IDEWorkspace record for my user via the workbench. 

This happened a couple of times in the last week, so I decided I needed a quicker way. 

bb:logs:delete 

Since the Summer 19 release, we can store up to 1,000Mb of debug logs, so I don't often fill up the storage. That said, some of the areas I work in generate logs close to the 20Mb per log limit, and it doesn't take too many of those to start causing a problem. 

Up until now I'd query and delete via the developer console, but a CLI command is a little more efficient. This command also takes a -a flag to delete all logs in the org, rather than just those for my user.

Upgrading

Regardless of which plug-in you need to upgrade, you run the same command:

sfdx plugins:update

this checks for newer versions of all of your installed plug-ins and, if it finds any, installs them.

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Visual Studio Codespaces - the tech behind Code Builder

Salesforce launched Code Builder in June 2020, just before the 2020 TrailheaDX virtual conference, and it's fair to say there was some excitement around this. Those expecting a Developer Console Mk 2 must have been delighted to see a full-featured IDE that can run in the browser.  Even better, we confirmed with the product team that as the IDE is effectively running in a virtual machine, any required extensions and Salesforce CLI plug-ins can be installed, so you can recreate your local environment with all your favourite features.

I was certainly excited about this and reached out in a number of directions to try to get on the pilot, all of which sadly failed - I needed to be nominated by an Account Executive, and experience has taught me that at our number of licenses our AE typically doesn't even know that pilots are available, much less how to nominate me for one.

Undaunted, I took a different approach and started looking at the technology that powers Code Builder - Visual Studio Codespaces.  

Visual Studio Codespaces

Formerly known as Visual Studio Online, the description from official Microsoft site sums it up very well:

Cloud-hosted dev environments accessible from anywhere

There's some signup and setup required to start using Codespaces, as detailed below.

Sign up for Azure

A Microsoft account and Azure subscription are needed, as Azure hosts the virtual environments (machines). I chose the free subscription, which gives me 12 months free Linux virtual machine access. Compute hours are limited, but in all likelihood I'll use this rarely and then assuming it doesn't require me to spend a bunch of money, little or never once Code Builder is available.

VS Code Extensions

I then had to install a couple of extensions :

• Azure Account, which gives VS Code access to my Azure subscription that I've just created. Signing in to this took ages, and was eventually tracked down to some kind of conflict with my Skype account that I was logged in to at the same time. The Skype account is linked to my Microsoft account in the same was as Azure is, but VS Code wasn't having it. In the end I logged out of Skype and I was able to login to Azure. Since then I've been able to login to Skype and Azure in any order, so it may have been a glitch with one of the connections at that point in time. If in doubt, sign out of everything!]
• Visual Studio Codespaces, this allows VS Code to manage and connect to remote dev environments - you don't have to use the browser as a front-end with Codespaces and I can't see any reason you wouldn't be able to do this with Code Builder also, but time will tell.  

You also have to sign in to Codespaces, which you can do via the button on the left of VS Code:

Once you've signed in, choosing to create a new Codespace will take you through a process of creating a new plan - the key questions are the Azure region - make sure to choose one close to you, and the default instance type - I went for Linux.

Putting it Together

Once the accounts and extensions are in place, VS Code gains a new icon at the bottom left:

Clicking this opens the Codespaces menu: 

Choosing 'Create New Codespace' generates a new remote environment, after capturing some information from me. First, what type of environment I want - I've only used the Default settings and had no problems to date.

I then have a choice of creating an empty Codespace, or populating it with the contents of a repository - I'm using my Curated repo (currently private, but the contents of the repo aren't really important for this post - if you are curious what it is, it's my toolbox):

Then an easy question to answer - the Codespace name.

Once all the questions are answered, the extension gets to work on a new Codespace:

As well as the progress bar, a new panel opens on the right of VS Code to show the steps being completed (assuming all goes well - I've had one or two failures, but most of the time it's a breeze);

Once the setup is complete, clicking the Connect button opens the remote workspace through my local VS Code installation, which looks pretty much the same as a local workspace, bar a larger green element on the bottom left of the window:

and the fact that any changes I make here are not reflected in my local workspace unless I round trip them to the version control system. 

This is all well and good, and if I don't have a particularly powerful machine it's a nice way to be able to work on multiple projects at the same time and push a lot of the computing requirement to the cloud. The more interesting environment, however, is the browser.

Codespaces in the Browser

To access my Codespace from a browser, I have to login to the Visual Studio Codespaces web site at : https://online.visualstudio.com/login, using my Microsoft account that I attached my Azure subscription to. As an aside, I only seem to be able to login via a regular Chrome window, not an incognito one. I've no idea whether that is intentional, but it's been consistently the case since I started playing with Codespaces.

Once I've logged in I can see all of my current Codespaces, and I have the option to create more directly from the web site:

Clicking on my new CuratedBlog Codespace opens the IDE in the browser:

And as this is a virtual machine, the terminal works in the browser too!

That's all there is to it?

Not quite - while this gives me a Visual Studio Codespace primed with my Salesforce application metadata and running in the cloud, it doesn't know much about Salesforce, so I have to do a little more setup - note you can configure your Codespace environment via a devcontainer.json file in your project directory, so you wouldn't have to do this every time if you were spinning up multiple codespaces. I haven't looked at this in detail.

• Install the Salesforce Extension Pack from the VS Code market place
• Install the Salesforce CLI - I've found the easiest way is via npm 

Once this is done, you now have the tools to interact with Salesforce orgs, but you still need to authenticate against them. This is the slightly long-winded part as, while it is technically possible to run a browser in a docker container, it doesn't look straightforward, so you'll likely end up using the JWT flow. This isn't particularly difficult, as long as you are familiar with the command line and open SSH commands, but it is a little long-winded as anyone who has set up a CI machine will testify, with the connected apps, keys and certs that you have to set up.

A similar problem presents itself once you have authenticated against your dev hub and created a scratch org - clicking the icon to open the org can't open a browser, so doesn't really do anything. The upside here is that it will typically tell you the URL that it is attempting to open which includes a session id, so you can copy/paste that into your local browser to access the scratch org, even though you haven't got any oauth for this org set up. The URL will appear in the Output tab:

This is where I expect Salesforce to add the Code Builder value - generating a Codespace that has the extensions and CLI pre-configured and already authorised against the org, as well as some other items that I haven't stumbled across yet.

Wrapping Up

While Codespaces require a bit of effort, until Code Builder is more widely available they are a really good way to be able to develop from any device that has a supported browser and internet connection.  In fact I was able to use Chrome on my iPhone XS to push changes to a scratch org. The UI was terrible so I wouldn't recommend it, but as an intellectual exercise it was fun.

Related Posts

• Codespaces documentation from Microsoft
• Salesforce blog post introducing Code Builder
• Salesforce Developer Podcast episode on Code Builder

Follow @bob_buzzard