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5 Things Salesforce Developers Can Get Excited for in 2022

Introduction

Salesforce is continually evolving to deliver amazing experiences for its end users. The Spring ‘22 release, just like all Salesforce updates - which happen three times a year - had interesting things for developers to be excited about.

In this blog, we take a look at these, as well as a couple of features that aren't exclusive to this release but should be available later this year. 

Foyer

Since we can design applications that connect Slack and Salesforce, you’ll need a middleware layer to connect the two. Foyer is a feature that will be available later this year (safe harbor). The foyer should enable us to focus development time on Slack and Salesforce platforms, drastically reducing the time it takes to build out solutions. Rather than coding the middleware from scratch, Foyer seamlessly integrates it into the system, making configuration simpler. 

Foyer was officially announced at Dreamforce in September 2021 and is now closed in Beta. It will be initially offered to ISV Partners for inclusion in their AppExchange packages, but now is a great time to talk to your administrators to see how these Slack apps can be used to streamline your business processes.

UI Test Automation Model (UTAM)

This will enable a more powerful method for developing automated UI tests. Traditionally, these types of tests have been very difficult to write and maintain, often requiring third-party tooling and solution. 

UTAM claims to make this much better by introducing the common Page Object model design pattern (which you may have seen if you’ve used Selenium for testing). UTAM’s Page Objects are written in JSON, and the big idea is to move away from Xpath locators to target DOM nodes, and instead utilize CSS.

Salesforce plans to make UTAM an open-source, with the possibility of it playing a larger role outside of Salesforce development. 

Lightning Web Security

Salesforce Locker Service has provided an extra layer of security to the web components served by our orgs, irrespective of whether they’re LWC or Aura components written by us, or provided by our suppliers. This crucial security has come as a technological cost, whether in the form of restricted cross-component support or reduced third-party JavaScript libraries that are compatible with Locker Service.

Lightning Locker is a robust security framework for Lightning components. It increases security by separating Lightning Components belonging to one namespace from those belonging to another. 

Flow Trigger order

From the onset, there has been no particular way to specify the order in which the record-triggered flow should run. This led to the adoption of the “one flow per object” practice, which in turn, led to the construction of large flows. 

However, this new update now allows for “trigger order” to be specified against before- or after-save flows. This is a huge thing for Salesforce Admins and Developers. 

Flow is evolving rapidly, and there are still noticeable parity gaps between flow and code from a developer’s perspective. It should be treated seriously and not overlooked for Apex without consideration.

Functions

Since the Winter ‘22 release, Salesforce Functions have been available. Still, relatively high costs and some other factors have led to slow adoption. In my opinion, Functions are the key solutions simpler, and we’re hoping for a price decrease or remodeling to happen this year.

You don’t need a license to get started with Salesforce Function. You can use the Salesforce Developer Tools to design and test functions right now.