Salesforce is now one among the top-rated cloud platform, which serves as a SaaS, i.e., software as a service, offering a handful of powerful development tools in the Salesforce Cloud ecosystem. The latest in this suite is Salesforce DX that allows the users to build and manage functional Salesforce applications across the platform in a quicker, efficient, and pretty direct manner. To leverage the full power of this mighty tool, the developers need to know the advantages and flaws of DX.

In this latest release of Salesforce DX, the first change to note is that the Production Org has been counted as the new code source of truth. There are also features of customizations and custom configurations. The updates and releases can also be developed with an easy deployment through the Production Org. The major benefit of this model is that a development team becomes familiar with the technologies and lifecycle involved.

Otherwise, it may be a very difficult to coordinate it initially with the team. On the other hand, the version control on Salesforce DX is not seamless. In addition to these, the developmental model also will not support the agile development methodology for continuous integration. Automation of the testing process may also be difficult in terms of rolling back the releases or creation of a separate module version.

These are some of the areas where the new Salesforce DX may be handy.

What Salesforce DX does differently?

Salesforce DX equips the users with:

  • An improved VCS (Version Control System) which enables continuous synchronization with a change-tracking feature in the setup. This will let the developer get a better grip in terms of collaboration, control, testing, disaster management, and auditing.
  • Salesforce DX also puts forth the ability to enhance the quality of the apps and better time to market with its ability to do Continuous Integration (CI) and also Continuous Delivery (CD)
  • Salesforce DX also ensures better clarify and visibility in terms of change management by using Production Org.
  • The package also can implement a much more agile release management.

As any of the standard technology tools, Salesforce DX also comes with some pros and cons associated with it. The developers and development teams who are getting on this platform should know these to leverage it at best and ensure optimum output.

Salesforce DX – Pros

  • Salesforce DX helps to improve collaboration and team development.
  • It also helps facilitate the automation of testing and continuous integration.
  • Making release cycles much efficient, being agile.
  • The developers can create and Org and transfer all the metadata and sources of app codes into it from GitHub.
  • It is also possible for you to set up the work-space locally using Salesforce DX.
  • Open technology and cost-effective
  • Developers can use any random tool to modify the code as Vim, CLI, Atom, Sublime, etc.

Salesforce DX – Cons

  • Being a relatively new platform, Salesforce DX lack some essential features, and the users also may encounter some bugs in it.
  • The time needed to learn the Salesforce DX suite is also pretty long for the conventional development team members to familiarize with this technology and a different development life cycle.
  • Troubleshooting Salesforce DX may also be a bit difficult by using the search engines.
  • It demands a heavy use of instruction from the command prompt, which makes things a bit different from the administrators.

Expert consultants for Salesforce DX like Flosum.com help the users to automate their processes with optimum scalability and maximize return on investments. Flosum helps the enterprises to stay on top of the market with secured and on-demand data use by automating business processes and allow the talent shift to more strategic initiatives for business development.

Some other Salesforce DX facts

By introducing Salesforce DX, the provider narrowed down the gap between standard development and Apex development. However, we can see that there is still a gap. One of the major drawbacks to notice is its inability for auto-completion. Standing alone, DX doesn’t have context awareness, so the development could be a bit tedious here to take a trial and error developmental approach. To tackle this issue, Salesforce had released some free supportive plug-ins for the VSCode, which offers a higher convenience and functionality than expected from the latest IDEs. Even though such plug-ins assist in context awareness, maintaining an accurate list is still difficult for enabling auto-completion.

Another important thing to note about Salesforce DX is its incompetence in debugging the Apex code. There is also a checkpoint method, which is equivalent to the breakpoints. However, it not much debugging as much as logging. With this approach, it may not be possible for you to step through the code at various stages but can only access the code which has already run and can view the variable logs at different checkpoints.

More importantly, using DX alone may not be enough to manage the conflicts in codes in which only the most recent code wins over the old. This is one major drawback raised by the Salesforce DX critics, as in comparison with the conventional org-based development which Salesforce developers used to do till date. However, Salesforce DX makes a positive move to transition the developmental process form the org to an innovative source control repository. For the developers who are experienced, this may be something which is very much given, but for the Salesforce only developers, it makes a huge impact.

In fact, what we discussed here are the pros and cons of Salesforce DX from the developer point of view. We have seen how the add-ons can improve custom code writing of Apex code, but you need to know how to manage the changes also through source control. It will also be advisable to know how to track changes made to orgs using declarative programs. We will e discuss more the Salesforce methodologies with the new source of truth in the forthcoming articles. It is also essential to know about Scratch Orgs, which is one of the major game changers in the DX suite, which too we will discuss in further articles.