Salesforce DX – Introduction

Salesforce DX stands for Salesforce Developer Experience. It is a Salesforce product within the App cloud that helps developers to develop and manage the Salesforce app efficiently.

Salesforce DX proposes a new project structure for the org’s code and configuration. It is mainly used by developers as it permits us to have a true version control. We can store all the code and configuration items in a system called “Version control” (VCS) to bring consistency to the team’s development processes. Version control is an important part of an agile release plan. It helps users develop and release new features quickly and with almost negligible risk factors.

Now when it comes to Apex coding, Salesforce Developer Experience (DX) incorporates a lot to give us towards ‘Source-Driven-Development’.

– We can benefit from the modern collaboration technologies
– Rapid Testing and Development
– Ability to apply best practices to Software Development
– More agility to develop Salesforce apps in a team environment. Instead of the org, our version control system would be the source of truth.

Salesforce DX introduces a brand new sort of Salesforce environment in Scratch orgs. These are orgs consisting of Salesforce code that may simply be created or destroyed per module/feature, thus speeding up the standard development workflow.

Why use DX?

In a regular Salesforce development lifecycle, application developers use different sandboxes to create and test changes. With Salesforce DX, we can change the way our team members work. Instead of collecting together the state of various environments to get the latest versions of code or metadata, the team can get the latest versions from a centralized source control system, like Git or Subversion. This way of managing development artifacts that is code and other customizations is called source driven development.

Migrating to source driven development won’t drop conflicts in code or metadata, or alter the need to communicate clearly across teams. But it does put the burden of planning, managing and fixing changes into source control systems, which are built to do this efficiently. Source driven development can also give the team greater clarity into the changes done to the org, whether in code or configuration, and more reliable alternatives to undo changes that have negative impacts.

In addition to supporting source driven development, Salesforce DX has features to help move to a new way of managing propaganda and the changes we make to the org. Within the Developer team, using the tools of Salesforce DX has allowed us to work together on building applications and iterating on our approaches quicker than ever before.