Behind the App is a new series exclusive to Trailhead Live that takes a deep dive into some of the coolest new Salesforce Labs solutions! Each month, we’ll get to know the developers behind some of the awesome apps developed for Salesforce Labs.
What is Salesforce Labs?
It’s an internal innovation program here at Salesforce that encourages employees to build and deploy apps on AppExchange. All of these apps are then available to install for free and a majority of the builders publish their source code to the Salesforce Labs Github account.
Multi-Org Security Summary
In our first episode, we speak to Andrew Paterson, co-creator of the Multi-Org Security Summary. He explains that the app was created to help organizations better manage the security health of their Salesforce orgs in a multi-org environment. The app can be installed into each of your orgs and then configured to sync the security health check data from each org into a designated central org for analysis.
Solve for X
In each episode we’ll focus on three technical challenges faced and overcome by the developers of the app. In this episode we look at some the the UI, data, and composition challenges — and how the Multi-Org Security Summary developers solved them.
Solve for UI
One of the challenges discussed was the process of creating a highly responsive grid layout with a Lightning Web Component. To achieve this, they were able to attach a resize event listener to the outer div of the component that can then fire each time the window is resized. That event is then caught within the components JavaScript and it calculates the size of each risk item.
Solve for data
There were many data challenges involved in building the app. From getting the health check data to the tooling API, to deserialising it against a set of custom objects, we learned a lot about how data drives the app. One feature discussed was how the app creates an encrypted token for syncing data to the central org.
Solve for composition
The last challenge we discussed was the approach needed to develop this complex app within a Lightning Web Component. We discussed the ways that state is used to drive the user interface and how events are used to change the state from the child components in the app.
Conclusion
The Multi-Org Security Summary app is just one excellent example of the innovative development coming out of Salesforce Labs. If you would like to learn more about the multi-org security summary be sure to check out the first episode of Behind the App on Trailhead Live!
In our next episode we’ll be chatting with the creators of the Lightning File Explorer, a really cool app that changes the way that you interact with files in Salesforce. You can catch the episode on Trailhead Live August 27 at 11:00 a.m. PT.
About the Author(s)
Stephan Chandler-Garcia is a Senior Developer Evangelist at Salesforce. He focuses on Application development, Security and Communities. You can follow him on Twitter @stephanwcg
Andrew Paterson is a Principal Technical Architect at Salesforce focused in Financial Services. His role is a pre-sales position, where he can mainly be found building proof of concepts in Salesforce and communities and discussing architecture and solutions with customers. You can follow him on Twitter @AndrewP_SFDC