The Org Documentor and the Order of Execution Diagram

Tweet

Introduction

Earlier this year (2022) Salesforce Architects introduced a diagrammatic representation of the order of execution, which was a game changer in terms of easing understanding. I've had a task on my todo list since then to figure out how I could incorporate it into the Org Documentor, and thanks to using up some annual leave in a freezing December, I've finally had time to work on it.

Click to View

I already have information about the configured automation organised by the order of execution step, but currently in a text format:

so it made sense to try to repurpose this. I really liked the idea of making the diagram clickable, via an image map, but I wasn't overly keen on adding JavaScript to display popups with the details of the configured automation, so I went hunting for a CSS/HTML only solution. 

I found it at Mate Marschalko's Medium post, which showed how to use the :target pseudo-class to show or hide overlay divs without a single line of JavaScript, so set about applying this technique to the Org Documentor via a new EJS template, heavily based on my existing order of execution template. I also needed to generate the image map element based on selected areas of the Salesforce diagram, for which I used <img-map> - I did find that it all went awry after I selected 4-5 areas, so I did them one at a time and copied the coordinates over to my new template. 

After a few hours work I had a reference to the Salesforce diagram in the generated documentation for each object, via the new Image Detail column:

but with elements that could be clicked on:

which would display the automation configured for the object for that specific step and a description if the user cared to read more.

Albeit with a couple of caveats:

• Because the red line around the clickable element is applied to an <area> element, these only display when the element is clicked. This means that to find what is clickable you need to mouse around looking for the change in the pointer (or look at the text version of the order of execution for the object and identify what is supported there)
  
  
• The page jumps around a bit under you. This is due to the nature of the :target psueudo class - when you click on an element, the URL is updated with a fragment identifying the popup required, which transforms from zero size to it's configured size in the centre of the page. This causes the browser to scroll down to show it correctly. When you close the popup, the URL is changed to remove the fragment, which makes the browser jump to the top of the page. This could be obviated by using a smaller image, but my view is it's better to live with this and have an image that you can read.

Try it Yourself

Version 4.1. 0 of the plugin includes this functionality and is available from NPM.

The sample output has been regenerated on Render,com, so if you access:

https://bbdoc-sample-output.onrender.com/orderofexecution/Author__c_image.html 

and click element 3 - Executes "Before Save" record triggered flows, you can see it in action.

Related Posts

• The plug-in on NPMJS
• Documentation generated from the sample metadata
• Sample metadata repository
• Plug-in source repository
• Documentation for the Documentor
• The latest from the Org Documentor
• The Org Documentor keeps on Executing
• Org Documentor - (Some of) The Order of Execution
• Org Doumentor - Field Count Badges
• The Documentor Documented (and Moar Detail)
• Org Documentor - Flag Non-Display Fields
• Org Documentor - Custom Header Colours
• Org Documentor - A Little More Configuration
• Org Documentor - Fields Usage in Page Layout
• Org Documentor and AuraEnabled Classes
• 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

Follow @bob_buzzard

Tweet

Dreamforce 2018

2018 marked my 9th Dreamforce, although the first of these was staffing a booth in the Expo for 4 days so it’s difficult to count that. In a change of pace, the event started on day -1 with a new initiative from Salesforce.

Monday - CTA Summit

The CTA Summit was pretty much my favourite part this year - an audience of CTAs and travelling bands of Product Managers giving us lightning (the pace, not the technology, although we did get some of that as well!) presentations and answering difficult questions - for me the questions were as informative as the presentations, especially if it was an area that I haven’t done a lot of work in. Nothing like knowing what others are struggling with so you can be ahead of the game.

The format was one that I’m reasonably familiar with, having been lucky enough to attend 3 MVP summits over the years, especially the constant reminders that you are under NDA and can’t share any of the content. Sorry about that! One thing I can share is that Richard Socher (Salesforce Chief Scientist) is an excellent speaker and if you get a chance to attend one of his talks, grab it. Some of the sessions were hosted at the Rincon Centre, where I saw a couple of outfits that looked really familiar.

Tuesday - Keynote

Early start as the Community Group Leaders State of the Union session was a breakfast presentation at the Palace Hotel from 7am, then more CTA Summit sessions before heading over to Moscone Center.

For the first (no pun intended) time that I can remember, Marc Benioff’s keynote took place on Day 1. As an MVP I’m lucky enough to get reserved seating for the keynote and made sure I was there in plenty of time - queueing with Shell Black prior to security opening put us in the first row of reserved seating, three rows back from the stage.

The big announcements from the keynote were Einstein Voice (conversational CRM + voice bots) and Customer 360. If you want to know more about these, here’s a slide from the BrightGen Winter 19 release webinar with links to the appropriate keynote recordings (if you can’t read the short links, you can access the original deck here) 

 

The keynote wasn’t the end of the day though, with CTA and MVP receptions on offer I was networking and learning late into the evening,

Wednesday - Speaking

After a couple of days listening to other people talking, it was my turn. First up was the Climbing Mount CTA panel session over at the Partner Lodge, where I was up the front in some stellar company. We even had parity between the male and female CTAs on the panel, which is no mean feat when you look at the stats, something the Ladies Be Architects team in the foreground and working hard to address.

 

After this I headed back to Trailhead in Moscone West, showing incredible self-control as the partner reception was just starting. I limited myself to a single bite sized corn dog and ignored the voice in my head telling me that a couple of beers would loosen me up nicely, and went straight over the speaker readiness room to remind myself of the content for my Developer Theatre session “Quickstart Templates with the Salesforce CLI” (picture courtesy of my session owner, Caroline Hsieh).

Once the talk was over I continued in a tradition started last year and went out for a beer with some of the contingent from Sweden - Johan (aka Kohan, Mohan) Karlsteen, the creator of Top Trailblazers, and one of his colleagues. As is also traditional, we took a picture and included a snapshot of the guy who couldn’t make it so that he didn’t feel left out :)

 

Thursday - More Keynotes and the Return of @adamse

Thursday was the second highlight of the event for me - the Developer Keynote, closely followed by the Trailhead keynote. A big surprise at the Dev Keynote was the presence of Adam Seligman, formerly of Salesforce but now with Google.

And I had pretty good seats in the second row for this keynote, better than Dave Carroll in fact. Did I mention I’m an MVP.

 

The gap between the Dev and Trailhead keynotes was only 30 minutes, but as they are literally over the road from each other I made it in about 20 (there’s a few people attend Dreamforce, so crossing the road isn’t as simple as it sounds!). I typically sit a bit further back in this one as there is huge amount of exuberance in the front few rows and I try to avoid displaying any excitement or enthusiasm in public if I can. 

After the keynotes I caught a couple more sessions before heading over to Embarcadero for the annual BrightGen customer dinner. I’d said to my colleagues when I bumped into them on Monday night that I’d see them again on Thursday, Some of those that hadn’t been thought I was joking, but they weren’t laughing when I showed up at 7pm. 

I also got to catch up with the winner of the UK and Ireland social media ambassador at Dreamforce competition - long time BrightGen customer, Cristina Bran, who told me all about her amazing week.

Friday - Salesforce Tower Trip

I’d been lucky enough to have my name picked out of the hat to get to visit the Ohana floor of the Salesforce Tower. It was a bit of a foggy day (what are the odds) but the views were still pretty spectacular.

and that was Dreamforce over for another year!

Vegas Baby!

The BrightGen contingent traveled home via Las Vegas for a little unwinding and team building. Like the CTA Summit, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, so I can only show this picture of me arriving at the airport, still sporting some Salesforce branding.

Follow @bob_buzzard

 

London Salesforce Developers - Certified Technical Architect Panel

Tweet

Certified Technical Architect Panel

The November meetup of the London Salesforce Developers had a different format to usual, when a panel of Salesforce Certified Technical Architects convened to answer questions from the community about the Technical Architect certification process.

The meetup was hosted at Cloud Sherpas and MC’d by Francis Pindar, with most of the organisation coming (as usual) from Anup Jahdav.  The panel consisted of 6 CTAs - Luke Emberton, Wes Nolte, Andy Mahood, Seb Wagner, Francesco Iervolino and myself - Keir Bowden.

Appearing at these events always requires a balancing act as the review board is subject to NDAs both from a candidate and judge perspective, so we aren’t able to go into any details of the board and have to make sure that we talk at a level that is useful but protects the certification - having worked so hard to achieve the credential the last thing any of us want is to devalue it.

We weren’t entirely sure how much interest there would be in an event of this nature, given that TA is the highest level of certification and not necessarily something everyone would have in their career plan.  As it turned out, this event had one of the best turnouts I can remember, as this shot from the back of the room shows.

The key points from the panel with regard to preparation for the board were:

• Identify the key areas from the study guide and try to get yourself on projects that have requirements of this nature - e.g. integration, complex security and sharing, single sign on
• Its an intense experience to remember to take a step back and breathe from time to time
• This isn’t something that you can prepare for simply by studying - you need real world experience
• Pre-sales work is useful preparation for being peppered with questions on a solution you have just thought of!

Related Posts

• Certified Salesforce Technical Architect
• London SFDC User Group Technical Architect Talk
• Technical Architect Certification home page

Follow @bob_buzzard

London Salesforce Developers February Meetup

Tweet

 

The February London Salesforce Developers Meetup took place this week, with 30+ people (Kingmakers!) attending. While the usual suspects were in attendance, there were quite a few new faces, which bodes well for the group.

John Stevenson gave an update on the events that are being run for the community - I can definitely say that the Git and Github Kickstarter Workshops are popular, as every time I receive a notification that one is available, by the time I click through to the details its full!

John Mahoney gave a demonstration of the steroid component library - I didn't get to see as much of this as I'd have liked to, as I was advising someone on customer portal setup in the corridor!

And in a startling development, which nobody could have predicted, I gave a short talk on Salesforce Certification!  As I served as a judge on the EMEA Technical Architect Review Board in January, I'm in a tricky position when talking about this certification. I've spent the last year trying to spread the word of how to pass the board, but that's clearly no longer appropriate. I was therefore fortunate to be joined by my colleague, and newly Certified Technical Architect, Chris Eales (@theEalesie), who talked about his experience and gave advice on how to prepare for the board, plus details of the mechanics of the process.  

The slide deck for this talk can be accessed here. (On a related note, I've added a Salesforce Certfication page to this site that contains links to all my certification related posts - you can access this from the right hand sidebar).

The meetups take place every month and include beer, pizza and plenty of time for networking.  If you haven't made one yet, we'd love to see you. Make sure to join the Meetup group to get notified of all upcoming events.
 

Follow @bob_buzzard

London SFDC User Group Technical Architect Talk

Tweet

This week I gave a talk at the SFDC London User Group meetup that took place on 26th July at the Skills Matter eXchange.

A recording of the talk is available from the Skills Matter web site, and the slide deck is available for download here.


If you have any questions on the presentation, slide deck or the technical architect certification in general, please post them to the comments section below and I'll lift them up into a Q&A section in this post.

Salesforce Certification

Tweet

In one of my earlier blog posts in April, I set up a mobile application that allowed readers to take a survey on their phone.  At the time I said that I might even take notice of the responses, and I've written this post because I decided I would!  Big thanks to those that tried the app out and gave me feedback.

One area that cropped up a few times was Salesforce certification, and this is also an topic that has garnered a lot of interest when I've blogged or tweeted about it in the past.

Why Get Certified

There are many good reasons to get certified.  A few that I'm aware of are as follows:

• Enhance your career prospects One of the ways in which Salesforce Cloud Alliance partners are measured is on the number and type of certifications their staff hold, and as the partner level increases through Silver, Gold to Platinum, the number and types of certifications required increases.  For example, Platinum Partners are required to have at least one Technical Architect on staff (which is why I had to complete this exam at pretty short notice at the beginning of the year!).  
  Thus having the appropriate certifications will definitely make you a more interesting candidate and most partners that I am aware of seem to be permanently recruiting these days.  Here at BrightGen, we are always interested in the right people.

• Gain Credibility with Customers In my experience, while this isn't something that customers are particularly aware of initially, it is generally well received when you list your certifications and explain the study and effort that you've had to put in to gain them, and your opinion carries more weight.  Obviously this can vary - for example, one prospect didn't seem to be particularly excited about my extensive list of certifications, but when they handed me their business card, mentioning a PhD and membership of a number of chartered institutes, I began to understand why.

• Validation Its a great feeling when you see the "Congratulations" message after submitting the exam. Moreover, you have demonstrated the appropriate level of knowledge and ability to earn that certification, which means that you must know something about it!  You can take comfort from that when you find yourself struggling or doubting your decisions.

• Special Events This is something specific to partners rather than all certified professionals so doesn't apply to everyone.  Events such as Spark the Social Enterprise give excellent opportunities to network with your peers and gain access to key Salesforce experts.  

• Because its there This was the motivation for me for the advanced admin and advanced developer exams.  Once I'd got those that were required from partnership perspective, I decided that I didn't want to stop until I'd got them all.  As I had the original Consultant certification which was discontinued in March 2012, I heaped additional pressure on myself to get all eight while that was still possible.

Resources

There’s a wealth of information on the internet regarding Salesforce Certification.  As is usually the case with these things, not all of it is useful!  My favourites are:

• Salesforce.com Certification Facebook Page
  This is where the latest news will break regarding assignment windows and exam status.  They also have regular ‘office hours’ Q&A sessions with their certified experts, which can have really useful information.
• LinkedIn
  There are a number of useful study and discussion groups on LinkedIn.  The Salesforce.com Certification team also post information and respond to questions, so its well worth following them.
• Force Certified
  The grandaddy of them all.  Great work by John Coppedge.

Studying

The starting point for me with any exam is the Study Guide.  This gives you details of the purpose and format of the exam, and then a point by point summary of the areas that you will be tested on and how much they count towards the overall mark.  

What happens next really depends on how you like to study - if you find videos the best way, the premier online training catalog has great material, including knowledge check questions throughout to see if any of it is sticking.  If you don’t have access to that, there’s a huge amount on the Salesforce channel on youtube.  

Personally, I’m a big fan of the written word, so I’ll usually head to the online help and go straight to the Printable Tip Sheets and User Guides section.  This is a collection of short documents that take you through setting up and using various aspects of the system.  Its basically the same information as can be found elsewhere in the help, but each document is standalone and takes you through planning, configuration, rollout and day to day use.  I find that reading through these documents while actually setting up and configuring a developer org really helps things stick in my mind.  I also tend to scribble my own highly distilled notes at the same time, then write these up into a short ‘pass notes’ style document that I use to refresh my memory in the run up to the exam.

The Exam

After all the hard work and studying is done, it’s exam time.  I’ve been taking the online proctored versions since they became available, as I much prefer sitting in my own house to travelling to my nearest testing centre in London.  The slight downside to this is that the setup is all my problem.  Clearing everything out of my study and setting the webcam up always takes longer than I expect, so if you are going this route make sure you allow plenty of time.  Also make sure that your webcam and microphone are working well in advance, so that you don’t find yourself rooting through boxes in the attic for your old microphone 10 minutes before the exam is due to start, which is exactly what happened to me the first time!

For most of the exams, the format is similar - a set number of multiple choice questions to be completed in a time limit.  The number of questions, time limit and passing grade differs, but all three increase as you move up the certification food chain.

Below are my tips when taking the exam:

• Make sure your webcam is set up exactly as required.  I’ve not had any issues with this, but I know people that have and by all accounts it’s pretty annoying and distracting to have the exam freeze and need to call the US.
• Read the question carefully.  Its really easy to miss the “not”, “doesn’t” or “excluding” and thus end up giving the perfect wrong answer.
• If you don’t know the correct answer, try to derive it by excluding the wrong answers.  As Sherlock Holmes said: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
• If you don’t know the answer and can’t derive it, mark it for review and move on.  A lot of the time it will come to you when you are thinking about another question.  Very occasionally a later question will be asked in such a way that it will guide you towards the correct answer for an earlier question.
• If you have access to a pencil and paper, note down how confident you are in the answer.  Based on the passing grade for the exam, it gives a good indication of the pass/fail likelihood.  If you’ve got a high level of confidence in most of the answers, you don’t need to sweat that there are a couple of guesses in there.  Of course the reverse is also true - if they are all guesses its going to be a bumpy ride.
  I give mine a percentage rating:
• 100% - definitely correct, in my mind anyway
• 75% - pretty sure it’s correct, but wouldn’t hurt to check later
• 50% - I’ve narrowed it down to a couple, one of which is definitely the answer
• 25% - one sounds more plausible than the others
• 0% - total guess

Share the Love

After you’ve taken the exam, share your experience with the wider community.  Even if you didn’t pass, you may be able to serve as an example for others!

Once you have your certification, you may become the subject matter expert for that area within your company.  Organize some presentations or study group sessions to pass on your knowledge to your colleagues.  This is something I’ve done a fair bit of at BrightGen, and it really works.  Start out with a general heads up about the topic, then capture feedback at the end of each session about what the attendees would like to cover next time and before long you’ll have a team of certified experts and a rich library of collateral.

Write a blog post on your certification journey.  Try to put your personal spin on it, rather than just repeating topic areas from the Study Guide. Was it harder or easier than you thought?  Were there areas that cropped up a lot so you really need to know those in depth? How did you prepare for it, and if you did it again would you try a different approach?

Don’t Game the System

Once you start sharing information, you are likely to start receiving requests to share dumps or sample questions.  Don’t.  You’ve put all that hard work into it, why should someone else get an easy ride?

Don’t try to game the system yourself either.  While having the credential might get through the door for a job, you’ll quickly be found out if you haven’t earned it.   I can’t think of anything worse than being presented to a customer as an expert in the field and then being unmasked as a chancer.  The Salesforce community is also tightly knit, so if you do this the word is likely to spread.

The Sales and Service cloud certifications were withdrawn in April 2012 and have just returned to beta, due to reports of the question and answer set being publicly available.  This is a poster child for the damage that gaming the system can do. Many innocent parties who studied hard for the exam suddenly had their booking cancelled due to a few guilty ones who wanted to cheat their way to success.  In some ways this can be viewed as a backhanded compliment - if the credential wasn’t worth having, people would be trying to cheat their way through, and if it was easy to achieve they wouldn’t need to cheat.

Cloudstock Slide Deck

I had this blog post written a few weeks ago, but then an opportunity to present at Cloudstock came up so it had to go on hold so that I didn't pre-empt my talk. My slide deck from that session is available for download here.

Cloudstock London 2012

Tweet

In an unexpected turn of events, I'm going to be presenting a community session at Cloudstock London 2012.  Unexpected as I hadn't planned on this, but a slot came open at the last minute and I agreed to fill in.

The upside to this is that I didn't have much time to think about what I was committing to.  The downside was that I had to decide on my topic and produce a description in a few hours.  What to speak about then?   It had to be something I was familiar with that wouldn't take a huge amount of time to prepare, as Cloudstock was just over a week away.  Looking at the list of existing community sessions, there was a theme of deep dives into specific technical areas - @wesnolte on Javascript Remoting and MVC Frameworks for example, or @pbatisson on Advanced Force.com Testing Techniques.

It struck me that there was an opportunity here to reach those attendees with little or no experience of Force.com, or those with some experience looking to progress.  There was already a breakout session introducing the Force.com platform, so there was little point in a session with the same technical angle.  Therefore I decided to look at this from a different perspective, and cover starting out as a Force.com developer, what employers are looking for and career progression.

This seemed like a good starting point, but unlikely to fill a 30 minute session unless I spoke very slowly! As followers of this blog know, if there's one thing I'm pretty familiar with that's Salesforce.com Certification. Most Salesforce/Force.com careers will involve gaining certifications - its certainly a key metric for Cloud Alliance Partners - so I'll be talking about the benefits, what the exams involve and how to prepare.  Since I gained the Technical Architect accreditation I've had a lot of interest in the exam, particularly the Review Board, so I'll be covering that too and expecting questions!

So if you are thinking about a job in Force.com development, or looking to gain recognition and advance your career through Certification, join me at Cloudstock from 12:30 to 1pm to find out more.