Learning Salesforce Lightning Application Development

20.35 MB·English

by  Mohith Shrivastava

Learning Salesforce Lightning
Application Development
Build and test Lightning Components for Salesforce Lightning
Experience using Salesforce DX
Mohith Shrivastava
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Learning Salesforce Lightning Application
Development
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First published: July 2018
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ISBN 978-1-78712-467-7
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Foreword
In the last decade, web technologies have changed beyond anybody's prediction. There was
a time when people across industries were talking about moving away from JavaScript.
However, it worked the other way around. Frameworks like Angular and React became the
backbone of many enterprise applications and emerged as favorite technologies to build an
application.
In a nutshell, it is the JavaScript that won and established itself as a winner of this decade. It
is not only used for desktop based applications, but also in mobile and server-side
programming such as Node.js.
It isn't really about JavaScript, but rather the impact it has created on technology industry
and workforce. Salesforce has been awarded as the most innovative company multiple
times in the past several years and it wouldn't come as a surprise if we see Salesforce
already ahead in the race of adopting cutting-edge technology.
One of many success mantras for Salesforce is to keep developer and admin happy. It offers
powerful tools to a developer to create top-notch features and customizations, at the same
time it enables Administrators to use, configure, and suggest improvements for those
components.
How can we leverage the JavaScript workforce, give developers the tool they want, and
how to make administrators superheroes of implementations?
Welcome to the world of Lightning Experience! Did you noticed, how many targets this
innovative company shot with a single arrow?
Lightning Experience is the future of Salesforce implementations and there is no doubt in
saying, Lightning Component is its soul. If you have JavaScript developers, let them work
on client controller, if you have Apex developer, let them work on Server controller.
Reusable Components built by developers can be used creatively by Salesforce
Administrators in Record Page, Home Page, Community, Wave Dashboard and so on.
If you are new to Salesforce development or been a developer for many years working on
Visualforce, you would need to skill up in Lightning Component development. Lightning
Component is a blend of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Apex, and Salesforce Platform features,
and you need to make sure you got your blend right to build a delicious Lightning recipe.
I believe this book written by Mohith, would give you the right proportion of knowledge
about JavaScript and Salesforce platform features to build mind-blowing components and
impress your team and clients. This book contains so many tips and pointers which will
open up your imagination and would get you excited!
Jitendra Zaa
Salesforce MVP and Sr. Technical Architect at IBM
Contributors
About the author
Mohith Shrivastava has been building and architecting Salesforce applications since 2011,
when he graduated from the National Institute of Engineering, Mysore.
He is currently a Salesforce MVP and holds multiple Salesforce certifications. He is an
active contributor on Salesforce Stack Exchange Community. Mohith has authored Learning
Salesforce Einstein and Salesforce Essentials for Administrators for Packt publishing. In his
leisure time, he loves exploring the latest technologies and spending time with his family.
I would like to thank my parents for nurturing and helping me in all possible ways. I
would like thank my wife, Nisha, for her never-ending love and support. The editing team
at Packt, as well as my colleagues and the management at Codescience, have been very
supportive throughout the journey of this book.
Special thanks to the Salesforce Ohana Community, and to Abhishek Raj and Jitendar Zha
for reviewing the content and testing the code.
About the reviewers
Abhishek Raj is a Salesforce consultant working at one of the Big Four consulting firms. He
started his career in ISV product development. He has experience with Apex, Visualforce,
Lightning, Einstein, predictive analytics, Wave, Java, and the Spring Hibernate frameworks.
He has worked on multiple projects in various sectors, such as manufacturing, healthcare,
consumer, Insurance, and credit services. He currently holds six certifications from
Salesforce. He is a keen and active member of the Bangalore Salesforce Developer group.
He is also Meritorious Alumnus of NMIMS University, Mumbai. He has reviewed Learning
Salesforce Einstein by Packt Publishing.
In his free time, he loves to watch movies and explore the upcoming and the latest trends in
technology.
I would like to thank my parents, siblings, and my wife for always supporting me and
allowing me to give time to this amazing content.
Jitendra Zaa is a Salesforce MVP and possesses 21 Salesforce certifications. He has worked
on the Salesforce platform for more than a decade now. He is also the author of Apex Design
Pattern, published by Packt Publishing. You can read more about Salesforce-related topics
on his blog at JitendraZaa [dot] com.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Introduction to the Lightning Component Framework 8
Lightning Experience 9
Lightning Application 10
Creating a Lightning Application 12
Creating tabs in Lightning Experience 14
Lightning Component Tabs 15
Lightning Page Tabs 15
Lightning App Builder 17
Lightning Utility Bar 19
List views in the Lightning UI 21
The ability to calendar data in the Date and Datetime fields 23
Global Actions 24
Publisher actions 26
Lightning Component architecture 27
The concept of web components 28
Lightning Component Bundle 29
Lightning Component lifecycle 30
MVC concepts in the Lightning Component framework 31
Setting up a Salesforce developer organization to enable the
building of Lightning Components 32
Creating a simple hello world Lightning Component 33
The Lightning Design system 36
Creating a simple card component using SLDS 36
Summary 38
Chapter 2: Exploring Salesforce DX 39
Enabling the developer hub in your Salesforce organization 40
Enabling the developer hub 40
Installing the Salesforce DX CLI 41
Salesforce DX commands 43
auth commands 43
Setting a default Dev Hub for scratch Org creation 44
Creating a new Salesforce DX project 44
Configuring a scratch Org definition JSON 45
Configuring project definition JSON 45
Creating a scratch Org 46
Opening the scratch Org 47
Pulling source from a scratch Org 47
Push source code to a scratch Org 49
Table of Contents
Conflict resolution 51
Ignoring files 51
Lightning commands 51
Creating a Lightning app and components 52
Metadata API commands 53
mdapi:convert and mdapi:retrieve 53
Converting existing managed/unmanaged package code to DX Format 54
Deploy command 55
Data import and export commands in Salesforce DX 55
Data export Salesforce DX command 55
Data import Salesforce DX command 57
Bulk data upsert Salesforce DX command 57
Limitations of bulk upsert commands 58
Installing the Visual Studio extension pack for DX 58
Developer workflow for building a Salesforce application 60
Summary 66
Chapter 3: Lightning Component Building Blocks 67
Component markup and using Lightning base components for
layouts 68
Component definition aura:component 68
Access modifier 68
Providing a description to component 69
Implementing interfaces in Lightning Components 69
Lightning base components for layout and layout items 70
Lightning card base component 72
Example layouts using the Lightning layout and card components 73
Horizontal alignment using the Lightning layout base component 76
Vertical alignment using the Lightning layout base component 78
Stretching a LayoutItem using the flexibility attribute 79
Creating multiple rows and controlling the size of the row in Lightning layout 80
Lightning layout to handle multiple devices 81
Nested page layout using Lightning Layouts 84
Understanding attributes 87
Using Expression syntax 88
JavaScript controller and helper 89
Wiring the client-side to the server using Apex controllers 94
Summary 101
Chapter 4: The Lightning JavaScript API 102
Technical requirements 102
Using component get and set methods 103
Using the find function to locate the DOM 103
Introducing Locker Service 105
Strict mode enforcement in Locker Service 105
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