Building Incredible Apps: Our API Evolution to Support Amazing User Experiences

 John Vogt  Director, Product Management  Salesforce App Cloud  

How Salesforce APIs have evolved to support the Lightning Experience and what to expect in our upcoming releases

 Peter Wisnovsky  Architect, R&D  Salesforce App Cloud  

 Federico Recio  Lead Engineer, Tooling API  Salesforce App Cloud  

 Safe harbor statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995:

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Safe Harbor

•  How many people in the room have programmatically worked with either Metadata or Tooling API? I will not count programming with Ant

•  How many of you are working on building integrations for your Org?

•  How many of you are partners that build on our API?

Getting to Know You

Our API Evolution To Build Amazing User Experiences How Salesforce APIs have evolved to support Lightning Experience

Setting the Vision…. Industry Best Cloud Platform

•  If our Partners are successful, then we are successful

•  Empower customers and partners to Build Amazing Experiences

•  Great APIs enable Developers to be agile and successful

•  IDE •  Open Source Salesforce IDE Platform •  Access to all Metadata contracts

•  Developer Console •  Reference implementation to help define our API

•  Build a Cloud-based IDE

•  Issues: •  Needed to use MDAPI interactively

•  Large File-Based API Types mean big retrieves and more difficult updates

The initiatives and drivers for our API Requirements.

Setting an initial Goal: IDE & Developer Console

•  Industry Standards •  REST and SOAP

•  Salesforce Standards •  SOQL & SOSL

•  For the IDE and the Developer Console •  Support SObject Row Update

•  Container for Saving multple Metadata Types

Our Requirements drove us to building a New API Enter the Tooling API!

API First: Build Everything on Public APIs!

Lightning Experience and the Object Manager

•  Need to call describe*() a lot •  Monolithic data structures - Describe results are too big to retrieve via 3G

•  Describe Calls are Brittle •  Consumers tied to 3 releases/year

•  Need Admin Access to info about Metadata Types •  Describe information not sufficient

Need APIs for Interactive Experiences

Delivering the Lightning Experience

Salesforce System Catalogs A new generation of interactive User Experiences

A long, long time ago...

•  We had SOAP API

•  Verbs like query(), upsert(), describe*()

•  Business Types based on sObject

•  Query Results shaped by SOQL

•  Configuration results fixed

In later episodes...

•  Configuration returned by Metadata API

•  Metadata results returned by name/wildcard

•  Contracts designed for file system and text editing

•  Configuration results now editable, but still Fixed

Plot complication!

•  Needed to call describe*() a lot

•  Describe results big to retrieve via 3G

•  Needed to use MDAPI interactively

•  Big types mean big updates with no OCC

•  Needed admin access to info about types

•  Describe information not sufficient

A New Hope… Salesforce System Catalogs

•  Based on new integration technology

•  Squeeze system configuration into sObjects

•  Fine grained update

•  Filter via SOQL WHERE

•  Result shaped by SOQL target list

•  RDBMS system catalog for SFDC

Like a lot of sequels… seems like a bit of a rehash

•  Verbs like query(), upsert()

•  Types based on sObject, MDAPI contracts

•  Query Results shaped by SOQL

•  User access via Data API

•  Org access via Tooling API

•  System/R design pattern from the 70s

A coherent, joinable schema for metadata

Comparison

  conn.describeGlobal();

  conn.describeSObject(“Account”);

 Describe - Retrieves Everything

Comparison

  conn.query(“ SELECT (SELECT QualifiedApiName FROM Fields) FROM EntityDefinition WHERE QualifiedApiName = ‘Account’ ”);

  -- load picklists on combo hover -- Safe Harbor – coming in Spring ‘16 – in some form

  conn.query(“ SELECT Value, isDefault FROM PicklistValueInfo WHERE FieldDefinitionId = ‘Account.Industry’ ”);

 Metadata Catalog - Retrieves only desired

Salesforce System Catalogs

•  Derived information accessible to SOQL

•  Supports both User and Org visibility

•  Unions custom and standard structures

Analogous to RDBMS System Catalogs

Object Manager Salesforce: API First means we fly our own jets

Building effective UIs

•  Describe* replaced by SOQL queries

•  Heavy use of aggregate relationships to reduce the number of API calls

•  Only retrieve what is needed to render the UI

•  Admin vs. User Access

EntityDefinition

•  Includes information about standard and custom entities

•  Useful relationships to retrieve data from related entities. For example: Fields, ValidationRules, Limits, LookupFilters, etc.

Replacing Describe Salesforce: API First means we fly our own jets

Object Manager object list

  SELECT Label, QualifiedApiName,   Publisher.IsSalesforce, ...   FROM EntityDefinition

Instead of doing a DescribeGlobal call the page is rendered with a simple SOQL query

Using Aggregate Relationships Salesforce: API First means we fly our own jets

Object Manager object detail page

  SELECT QualifiedApiName, Label,   (SELECT ... FROM Fields),   (SELECT ... FROM LookupFilters),   …   FROM EntityDefinition WHERE ...

Instead of doing a DescribeGlobal call the page is rendered with a simple SOQL query

Admin vs. User Access Salesforce: API First means we fly our own jets

Q & A Ask us anything related to Metadata and Tooling API!

Thank you

Why its important

API First approach to building UI means using describe, need a way to get only the information I want about the entities I want, for new admin and end-user-facing UI, without having to revise Describe shape

•  Metadata API • Release Management and Package Deployment

• Continuous Integration/Delivery

•  Tooling API • Org Access

•  External Integrations and Application Development

•  SOAP & Partner API

• User Access, Including FLS

•  Integrations and Application Development

Your use case will drive your choice. How do I choose an API?