Bob Buzzard Blog: document

Migrated Sample Output

November 28th 2022 marked a sad day in the Salesforce ecosystem, as Heroku free plans ended. From the learning perspective it's a real shame, as I'd used the free plans many times in the past to learn more about Node and other web technologies. From the live apps perspective it wasn't a huge impact, as the only work that I wanted to keep was a few static sties. Now we are into December it's happened, so time to find another home for my sites.

I ended up going for render, as it has a well regarded free tier and was very straightforward to set up. Going forward you'll find the sample output at:

https://bbdoc-sample-output.onrender.com/

I've updated some of the references in this blog and elsewhere, but I'm sure I'll have missed some, so if you come across a broken Heroku link then let me know and I'll fix it up.

Version 4.0.6

There's also a new version of the documentor plug-in available from NPM - this is a community contribution from Carl Vescovi that fixes a couple of bugs in the flow handling and adds the flow type to the output.

The Documentation Site

In case you haven't come across it before, the Documentor is documented (meta eh?) at:

https://orgdoc.bobbuzzard.org/home

This has details of how to setup and configure the Documentor, as well as release information.

Follow @bob_buzzard

Saturday, 27 March 2021

Org Documentor - Field Count Badges

Introduction

With large, mature implementations, it's sometimes difficult to keep track of how close you are getting to the field limits - for example, the total number of fields on an object, which varies from instance to instance, or the total number of relationship fields, which is 40 unless Salesforce are willing to raise it for you. This is compounded when you have multiple development streams working in parallel, as the total number of relationship fields in only known when the various branches are merged ready for cutting a release branch.

As Peter Drucker said, if you can't measure it you can't improve it, so the Org Documentor is getting into the measurement business.

Field Count Badges

The latest release (3.6.0) of the Org Documentor aims to help with this, by adding Bootstrap badges containing field counts to the object documentation. Right now it's the total number of fields on the object and the total number of relationship fields, as the screen grab below from the sample metadata output shows:

If there are no relationship fields, the badge isn't rendered:

Right now the badges don't change colour to flag up that the count is close to the limit, as there's no way to know if that is the case, as the Documentor is designed to work against object metadata and doesn't have access to any orgs that the metadata is installed into. Flagging the total number of fields as close to the Enterprise Edition limit isn't helpful if it will only be installed into Unlimited Edition, and vice versa is even worse. It's also possible that there are other fields on the object that aren't version controlled - added by a managed package for example.

So I decided to leave it as the standard Bootstrap secondary badge colour, which will remain the case unless I get feedback from users that they'd like something else. I'm also open to suggestions for additional badges - if you have any strong feelings on either of these topics, please create an issue at the plug-in Github repo.

As always, you can view the latest output for the sample metadata on the public site.

Updated Plug-in

Version 3.6.0 of the plug-in has this new functionality and can be found on NPM.

If you already have the plug-in installed, just run sfdx plugins:update to upgrade to 3.6.0 - run sfdx plugins once you have done that to check the version.

The source code for the plug-in can be found in the Github repository.