We've briefly mentioned what Salesforce is in the introduction, but it's also important to know what the Lightning Platform is before we start talking about multi-tenancy. The Lightning Platform is the infrastructure in which companies can enable one or more of the aforementioned cloud products, install apps from the AppExchange (the Salesforce store), or build their own custom apps.

Using the platform alone—that is, without one of the core cloud products such as Sales Cloud or Service Cloud—is also possible through Salesforce's platform as a service (PaaS) option. In a similar way to their CRM application, customers can pay a monthly fee to access the shared resources and build custom apps through PaaS.

The biggest benefits of using or buying a cloud service product is that everything is...

When I try to explain multi-tenancy to my customers, I always compare it to an apartment block.

For example, consider a scenario, where you – as a company or a customer – rent an apartment in a block that is owned by Salesforce, who is your landlord:

Here, your apartment has specific layouts and resources – that is, it has a number of rooms divided by walls. In addition to this, it has central heating, electricity, water, and more. To access and use this apartment, you pay a monthly rent, and everything else is taken care of for you and the other occupants in the building by your landlord.

Apart from your apartment (which is your private space), all the other resources are shared by the occupants of the building. This means that if Salesforce decides to upgrade the central heating to underfloor heating, then you will automatically benefit...

MVC is an architectural design pattern in modern software development that promotes the separation of an application into three components:

• An application's data storage (model)
• An application's user interface (view)
• An application's logic (controller)

The following diagram maps Salesforce's components to this architectural design:

This architecture is used a lot in software development because the isolation of data (that is, the model), user interface (that is, the view), and logic (that is, the controller) allows each component to be developed, tested, and maintained independently.

• Model: This is actually where your data is stored and can be used. To store data, you need objects or fields, and these are considered to be part of the model.
• View: This is whatever end users see and interact with; that is, what displays data to the clients...

I expect that this will be a recap for you; however, just to be sure, I would like to summarize the functionalities paired with some of the most popular core CRM objects. This is important, as a lot of questions in the exam will give you business scenarios around these objects, and before thinking about programmatic solutions, you should consider whether there is any declarative solution that comes out of the box that could be used to meet the requirement.

The lead object is mostly used for individuals and/or companies that have been identified as potential customers but have not been qualified yet. Leads can be created in several ways; you can create them manually one by one, by clicking on New...

AppExchange is the official Salesforce marketplace for business applications and is available at https://appexchange.salesforce.com/.

An app is a bundling of custom objects, fields, programmatic and/or declarative logic, and automations. They solve a specific business requirement or support a specific business process in a better way. You can install an app from AppExchange by simply clicking on the Get It Now button and decide on whether to install a production or a sandbox environment.

When you get a new requirement, it's good practice to check on AppExchange first, in order to see whether there is a solution already – either free or paid.

So, what can you find on AppExchange? Well, let's take a look, as follows:

• Apps: These are groups of tabs, objects, components, and business logic that work together...

It's important to understand one of the biggest differentiators of Salesforce in comparison to other CRMs. Salesforce provides a lot of tools and features to maximize declarative customization (through point-and-click tools). In fact, while configuring Salesforce to suit your business needs, in 80% of cases, you will be able to solve your requirement with declarative functionality. For the remaining 20% of the use cases, you'll need some kind of programmatic development.

Becoming a certified platform developer does not mean that you solve everything with code. Customers, consultancy agencies, and Salesforce all expect a Salesforce developer to be able to use the easiest tool to achieve a solution and, therefore, most of the exam will assess whether you are able to distinguish what can be achieved through declarative configuration...

So far, we have learned how working on a multi-tenant platform requires your attention while developing your own custom applications. Additionally, we have learned what the MVC paradigm is, how Salesforce comes with some core standard objects, how you can create your own custom objects, and how you can leverage declarative tools to customize and automate your environment to support your business processes.

In Chapter 2, Understanding Data Modeling and Management, we'll learn more about the Salesforce data model and how you can extend it. Additionally, we'll explore how to relate different objects to each other, how to visualize these different relationships, how you can import data into the platform, and how to export it. We'll be building our own basic international movie database in order to explore all of these concepts.

But, first, let's check whether...

You'll find all the answers to each chapter summary quiz at the end of this book (in the Appendix). Try to answer the questions first without looking at the answers:

1. Your manager wants you to build a solution that deletes all open tasks related to an opportunity when the Opportunity stage is set to Closed Won. In what ways could you build out this solution? Select two answers:
   1. Write an Apex trigger that fires when the Opportunity Stage updates to Closed Won, queries all the related Tasks that have an Open status for that opportunity and then deletes them.
   2. Create a Process Builder that performs a delete action on all the related Children of the Task type with Status Open, when the Opportunity Stage is set to Closed Won.
   3. Create a Process Builder that calls a Lightning flow whenever an Opportunity Stage reaches Closed Won. The flow then queries all Tasks related to the...