Section 1: Introduction to the Lightning Platform Core
This section of the book covers the core capabilities of the Lightning Platform that relate to the essential knowledge required to understand the platform, how to build a data model for it, and how to import and export data.
This section consists of the following chapters:
- Chapter 1, Core Capabilities of the Lightning Platform
- Chapter 2, Designing and Building a Data Model
- Chapter 3, Importing and Exporting Data
Chapter 1: Core Capabilities of the Lightning Platform
In this chapter, we will review the core capabilities of the Lightning Platform and test our knowledge of the Salesforce Fundamentals skillset, which is one of the primary objectives of the Salesforce App Builder Certification exam.
We will look at what makes up the Salesforce Lightning Platform and look at the concepts of the cloud, SaaS, multitenancy, and metadata-driven development.
There may be some sections in this chapter that you wish to skip if you have experience with Salesforce. However, it is hoped that these fundamental concepts will provide both a useful summary for experienced Salesforce app builders as well as key information for those that are new to Salesforce.
You will understand the capabilities of the standard Salesforce objects and the core Salesforce CRM schema and discover where the capabilities and boundaries lie when building apps with declarative and programmatic methods.
You will also learn about Salesforce AppExchange, which provides additional functionality that extends the core functionality.
Finally, you will be presented with a number of questions that test your knowledge of the core capabilities of the Lightning Platform that are covered in this chapter.
In this chapter, we will cover the following:
- Exam objectives: Salesforce Fundamentals
- What is the Salesforce Lightning Platform?
- Standard Salesforce CRM objects
- Customization options within the Lightning Platform
- Salesforce AppExchange
- Questions to test your knowledge
Exam objectives – Salesforce Fundamentals
The knowledge and skills that app builders are expected to demonstrate in order to pass the Salesforce Fundamentals section of the Certified Platform App Builder exam are as follows:
- Describe the capabilities of the core CRM objects in the Salesforce schema.
- Given a scenario, identify the boundaries of declarative customization and the use cases for programmatic customization.
- Identify common scenarios for extending an org using AppExchange.
Reference: Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder Exam Guide
This guide is published by Salesforce and can be referenced at https://trailhead.salesforce.com/help?article=Salesforce-Certified-Platform-App-Builder-Exam-Guide.
In the Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder Exam Guide the total number of questions is given as well as, a percentage break-down for each of the objectives, and an indication of the number of features/functions that can be expected in each of the objectives.
By analyzing these objectives, percentages, and question counts, we can determine the likely number of questions that will appear in the exam and for the Salesforce Fundamentals objective.
Salesforce Fundamentals: Total number of exam questions
There are likely to be 5 questions in total. This is calculated as 8% of the 60 total exam questions, which is 4.8 or 5 questions.
Using these figures for the Salesforce Fundamentals objective and the number of items that are likely to be assessed, we can determine that there would be 1-2 questions for each of the following concepts:
- The capabilities of the core CRM objects in the Salesforce schema
- Where the boundaries lie between declarative and programmatic customization
- How and when to use AppExchange
Now, let's look at what is meant by the Salesforce Lightning Platform.
Understanding the Salesforce Lightning Platform
Now that we know about the skills and knowledge that are expected for passing the Certified Platform App Builder exam, let's seek to answer the question what is the Salesforce Lightning Platform? The Salesforce Lightning Platform is a cloud service that uses the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) licensing and delivery model, and it has continued to evolve since its incarnation in 1999.
When it was first launched, the Salesforce Lightning Platform delivered services to empower Salesforce management within the limited realm of a customer relationship management (CRM) application. However, Salesforce disrupted the traditional software vendors of the day by introducing upgradeable, scaleable, feature-rich solutions for managing the sales process from lead to won deal and beyond within their initial CRM products.
The difference between the Salesforce Lightning Platform and other CRM software at the time was that not only did the CRM application contain standard CRM features but the features and functionality were continually enhanced and upgraded without the need for customers to install updates themselves. This ability of the platform to provide regular updates was achieved due to the multitenancy architecture of the Salesforce Lightning Platform. Let's discuss more about multitenancy.
Sharing system resources by using multitenancy
The multitenency architecture of the Lightning Platform provides a single instance of a database that is accessed by multiple organizations, or tenants. This is similar to multiple tenants sharing resources in an apartment block such as water, electricity, gas, and so on.
Multitenency allows economics of scale where the resource and maintenance overheads are shared by all those that are being serviced. Within the multitenancy architecture, when used for a single instance of the Lightning Platform database, all of the data is managed for all customers and is stored in a single database schema. This allows Salesforce to update only one application and have the changes distributed for all customers, resulting in three major functional releases per year for spring, summer, and winter releases.
The single database schema, however, does not only store customers' data but it also stores the mechanisms for determining how the data is secured and how it is functionally used by each of the separate customers. The Lightning Platform ultimately controls the data storage and organization functionality for each customer to enable the customization of the core processes, and this is achieved by the use of metadata.
Building business solutions within a metadata-driven development model
If you are not familiar with the Salesforce Lightning Platform, you could be forgiven for thinking that the architecture for the application simply uses a set of web pages connected to data storage (such as a relationship database) using a common industry database connection. This, however, is not the reality, and instead, the Salesforce Lightning Platform uses metadata to expose a system built from an abstracted database with associated user interfaces.
Salesforce realized at the outset when designing its platform that businesses have unique business processes and challenges, and two organizations are rarely the same. As a result, Salesforce developed the Lightning Platform with a metadata-driven development model in mind so that it could be customized by its customers.
The features and functionalities of any given app for any given customer within the Lightning Platform are defined by the collection of metadata for that app, partitioned and stored securely in the core database.
The benefits of the metadata-driven development model mean app builders, developers, and system administrators don't need to worry about connecting to data or spending time analyzing data access scalability or performane; instead, they can concentrate on building business solutions. Hence, application build productivity is increased. More importantly, the metadata-driven development approach provides app builders with the facilities to build apps, pages, and business processes without any code development.
Since the platform is multitenant and paid for by a SaaS licensing and ...
