What is Salesforce DX?
Salesforce DX is a product for App cloud environment. It facilitates the developers to create and manage Salesforce apps with a completely different approach, throughout the development life cycle. It is excellent platform to enhance the productivity levels with improved collaboration and better control.
Salesforce platform doesn’t have an in-built version control system and therefore DX was introduced. With version control feature, developers can manage the auditing and disaster efficiently. Salesforce DX enables the developers to build and release latest features in a short span of time with minimal risk.
How Salesforce DX works?
Salesforce DX is build using the attributes of Force.com and Heroku Flow along with some additional enhancements. DX operates by utilizing the migration tool from Force.com to retrieve and push metadata operations into an org. DX leverages Heroku Flow to deliver integration and application pipelines to restructure the workflow.
In summary, DX works by blending the manual actions and automatic functions to create simple workflows.
Important features of Salesforce DX
- Scratch Orgs
- Source Sync
- Salesforce Command Line Interface
- Test Runner
- Continuous Integration
- Brand new Force IDE with DX support
From the above mentioned features, ‘Scratch Orgs’ is the most interesting one. While developing projects, there are developers who follow software development practices. Thus, developing sandbox with no version control can be difficult at times. Doesn’t matter, if the developers have their own org, it will soon become incompatible with their version control, when they switch it with active branches.
In order to avoid this situation, enter Scratch orgs. With Scratch orgs, developers can quickly create new orgs using command and JSON configuration. It really fits well with the branch workflow wherein developers can branch their feature, create a Scratch org, deploy it, develop it and after finishing can delete it. Managing Scratch org can be simply automated using the CLI commands.
At the end, the Salesforce environment in Scratch orgs entails a Salesforce code or metadata that can be easily build or destroyed. Apart from that, they also help in accelerating the standard development workflow.
