Month: September 2018

Time for another change

It’s been almost two years since I threw the hat back over the wall and faced the challenge of leaving the comforts of my old job and community behind and join Salesforce as a Technical Architect in CSG (the Customer Success Group; our professional services division).

The last two years have flown by and I’ve become proficient and 6 times certified on Salesforce. I’ve spent loads of time at customer sites and learnt a lot from it and what challenges our customers are facing and why they’re choosing Salesforce. Although my time in CSG have been rewarding, challenging and educational it’s time for something new starting Monday 1 October.

Now I will not be leaving Salesforce as I’ve been able to find a really cool new position internally. Starting Monday I’ll leave CSG and switch to pre-sales and become a Cloud Architect. I’m very excited about this move. As a Cloud Architect I’ll be part of the greater pre-sales Solution Engineering team but instead of focusing on a specific cloud (Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud or Commerce Cloud) I’ll be part of a team that helps out with all the “technical stuff”. That means AppDev on our core Lightning Platform, Heroku, IoT, integration, security etc. It means helping out on sales opportunities and showing our customers or soon-to-be customers how they too can leverage the power of the Salesforce Platform to make them successful.

I’ve spent the last time dialling down my engagement with the customer I’ve been at since late April and only had sporadic contact with my new team. But although the contact have been sporadic I cannot wait for Monday and to get going. I already have public speaking engagements lined up and I’m looking very much forward to picking up public speaking again in my new role.

Wish me luck.

/m

jq and multi-field output to CSV

jq is some of the most underrated tools out there I think. It’s a command line JSON parser that makes it super easy to work with JSON on the command line and in turn makes developing small SalesforceDX tools a breeze. Today I needed to generate a CSV file of all fields from different objects for the integration team that doesn’t have access to Salesforce. Doing the describe is easy using the Salesforce REST API but when using jq different are usually on different lines like below (-r is a nifty switch for getting raw, unquoted strings).

$ sfdx force:schema:sobject:describe -s Account -u myorg --json | jq -r ".result.fields[] | .label, .name"
Age
Age__pc
PO Box
PO_Box__pc
Postal Code Before City
Postal_Code_Before_City__pc
Street No Before Street
Street_No_Before_Street__pc
Archived State
Archived_State__pc

The output is almost what I wanted but really wanted not  to have to edit the file manually to build the output. Some quick googling and it appears that jq supports both CSV and tabular output from arrays. So fixing the issue was as simple as follows:

$ sfdx force:schema:sobject:describe -s Account -u myorg --json | jq -r ".result.fields[] | [.label, .name] | @csv"
"Age","Age__pc"
"PO Box","PO_Box__pc"
"Postal Code Before City","Postal_Code_Before_City__pc"
"Street No Before Street","Street_No_Before_Street__pc"
"Archived State","Archived_State__pc"

This is so cool… Love it!!

Trying to explain Person Accounts in Salesforce

Person Accounts in Salesforce keeps confusing developers not at home on the platform due to their special behaviour. The purpose of the repo (https://github.com/lekkimworld/salesforce-personaccount-field-reference) is to hold some examples on how to work with Person Accounts in an org using Apex and the Bulk API to try and illustrate a few points.

What ARE PersonAccounts

First of knowing WHAT a Person Account is is important. In Salesforce we normally talk about Accounts and Contacts with the Account being the company entity (i.e. Salesforce.com Inc.) and the Contact being the people that we track for that company (i.e. Marc Benioff, Parker Harris etc.). It means that we have to have an Account and a Contact to track a person in Salesforce. But what if that doesn’t make any sense like when tracking individuals for B2C commerce or similar? Meet the PersonAccount.

Please Note: There is no such object as PersonAccount in Salesforce. There are only Account and Contact but in the following I’ll use PersonAccount to reference this special case for Account.

PersonAccount is a special kind of Account that is both an Account AND a Contact giving you the possibility to treat an individual using an Account. The secret to understanding PersonAccount is knowing that using a special record type and specifying it when you create the Account, Salesforce will automatically create both an Account AND a Contact record and automatically link them and thus create the PersonAccount. Salesforce automatically makes the fields that are normally available (including custom fields) on the Contact available on Account. Only thing you need to do is follow a few simple rules that are listed below.

Please Note: When using PersonAccounts you should always access the Account and never the associated Contact.

Referencing Fields

Because there is both an Account and a Contact for a PersonAccount there are some special rules to follow when referencing fields. This goes for any access whether that be using Apex, REST API and the Bulk API. The rules are pretty easy and are as follows:

  1. Always reference the Account object
  2. When creating a PersonAccount create an Account specifying the record type ID of the PersonAccount record type configured in Salesforce. Doing this makes the Account a PersonAccount.
  3. Fields from Account are available on Account (as probably expected):
    1. Standard fields from Account Referenced using their API name as usual (i.e. Site, Website, NumberOfEmployees)
    2. Custom fields from Account Referenced using their API name as usual (i.e. Revenue__c, MyIntegrationId__c)
  4. Fields from Contact are available directly on Account:
    1. Standard fields from Contact The API name of the field is prefixed with “Person” (i.e. Contact.Department becomes Account.PersonDepartment, Contact.MobilePhone becomes Account.PersonMobilePhone) UNLESS we are talking FirstName and LastName as they keep their names (i.e. Contact.FirstName becomes Account.FirstName, Contact.LastName becomes Account.LastName)
    2. Custom fields from Contact The field API name suffix is changed from __c to __pc (i.e. Contact.Shoesize__c becomes Account.Shoesize__pc)