11 Best coding Practices your Team can't skip

The code is the heart of Salesforce Custom Implementations, and to make sure the heart is strong, developers should always follow the best coding practices. Following best practices helps to align the efforts of your team and enable them to create more secure products with less wasted time and effort.

Our certified Salesforce developers adhere to Salesforce coding best practices to streamline and optimize the DevOps pipeline. This helps in creating and delivering better solutions that increase the overall ROI of a Salesforce DevOps project while improving the experience of the team.

We’ve filtered here some of the most valued coding best practices that could take your development game to the next level.

1. Use Static Code Analysis

One of the most significant factors that decide the success of your DevOps project is the strength of your code. So, the first Salesforce coding best practice would be to enable your team to produce strong possible structures. Even the most skilled developers could end up making mistakes that can open doors to failed deployments and data security vulnerabilities.

That’s why you should use static code analysis to achieve complete visibility into your code health right from the time when it is written till deployment.

2. Emphasize Data Security

With many recent high-profile data breaches that we keep on hearing about, data security has become an essential consideration during development. Besides functionality, developers should concentrate on data security front the beginning when writing code.

And the first step to safeguarding your system is to use all of these reliable coding practices. Your team should have access to code scanning tools that could be used to eliminate data security vulnerabilities.

3. Consider Avoiding Hard Coding IDs

Hard coding IDs don’t actually work even if you deploy Apex to two Salesforce environments.

For example, in development or production environments, there will be no guarantee that IDs will be the same in either. If you don’t use hard coding IDs and if the record IDs change between environments, the logic would be able to dynamically identify the data to operate against and the code will not fail.

4. Prioritize Automation

Testing, integrating lines of code into a single repository, and scanning the code for bugs are some examples of highly repetitive DevOps processes when performed manually. Being manual processes, there are high chances of error. Not just that, but these tasks can be incredibly time-consuming, taking the attention of the team away from more pressing and concerning issues.

To avoid these troubles, you can consider automating these tasks ensuring they are properly addressed. Not just this, but automation will also help to speed the project to the next stage of the Salesforce DevOps lifecycle.

5. Utilize Database Methods during DML Operation

An Apex transaction represents operations executed as a single unit. All DML operations in a transaction will be completed successfully. If these’s an error in one operation, the entire transaction is rolled back.

Apex allows you the ease generate a savepoint, which is a point in the request that specifies the state of the database at a particular time. You can use the Database class method if there’s any error to specify whether you want or not want to allow for partial record processing.

6. Write One Trigger per Object for any Event

Apex triggers help to automate certain tasks and allow you to perform custom actions before and after events in Salesforce. But it is important to note that while writing Apex Trigger you should create one Trigger per object.

You need a single Apex Trigger for one particular object. If you create multiple Triggers for a single object, you won’t be able to control their order of execution if they can run in the same contexts.

7. Use Helper Class

If the class or method you’re using is further giving several other classes or methods, you should make it a ‘helper’ instead. You don’t have to create helpers for specific reasons, you can simply rework your code so you can use the same ‘helper’ class or method throughout the code.

8. Use Collections

When using database systems, it’s usually the best move to work in batches rather than going one at a time. You can make the application work faster by operating on entire collections of data instead of single records. Hence, you should preferably consider running DML statements using collections.

9. Enable Reusability of Apex Code

The best code break methods into multiple smaller methods if possible, which makes it more modular and easier to read and maintain. One of the most valuable practices with Apex Code is to always write scalable and reusable code.

This kind of code can be reused in another functionality or module whenever required, thus saving you to write the code again and again. This practice enables you to make code generic, so you can use it with minimum modification, thus saving you time.

10. Name Conventions Carefully

Another important practice that you should follow around the Apex Code is to follow a proper naming convention. Naming convention in Salesforce is about deciding the name you’ll be assigning to identifiers like variable, class, constant, method, etc. However, it is not forced to follow and that’s why it is called convention not rule. But you have to make sure to pay attention while naming conventions so you don’t end up with repetitive identifiers.

11. Avoid Nesting Loops within Loops

Always remember to avoid nested loops in Apex controllers as they may slow down the processing or may hit the governing limits for the page. You might have encountered code with two or three or more nested loops, leading to affecting the performance of the code.

Another way to go is to make the inner loop a separate function or minimize using loops altogether to give a nice structure to the code.

Wrapping Up

Source code is most valuable when it’s secure, fast, reusable, portable, and scalable. And the key to getting this type of code is to follow the best coding practices. We have assembled here all the best practices that could help you develop a quality code for your Salesforce solutions.

If you need any more help regarding Salesforce development, our certified experts are just a call away.