Lightning Now Tour for Developers

By TechForce Services  Published On June 14, 2018

Introduction

This post is a summary/key takeaways from the Salesforce Lightning Now Tour for Developers in Sydney organized by Salesforce in June 2018.

The workshop began with an introduction to the Lightning platform. The introduction talks about Lightning as next level User experience, Lightning as new UI framework and Lightning as an Ecosystem.

Key tools that help in the switch to Lightning

  • Lightning Experience Readiness Check – A report with an assessment of the Org which shows what areas to be addressed is Salesforce.
  • Lightning configuration converter – Available starting Summer 18 release, this tool scans the org for simple JavaScript buttons and converts them to Lightning alternatives such as Lightning components, quick actions and other solutions without changing the original buttons.
  • Lightning usage App – This new App can be very handy to monitor adoption and usage of Lightning experience. It includes key metrics such as Daily/Monthly Active Users, number of users switching to classic.

Using Visualforce in Lightning

Salesforce would continue to support Visualforce and it can be used in Lightning:

  • As a Visualforce Tab
  • Embed in a Standard page layout
  • Global quick actions
  • Lightning component

Use to style Visualforce pages to match the Lightning Experience UI when viewed in Lightning Experience

Use SLDS (Salesforce Lightning Design System) for custom markup to always look like Lightning experience.

Developing in Lightning

Use Lightning inspector Google extension to inspect Lightning cache, view performance of page and component rendering step by step.

  • Lightning test service using Jasmine, MOCHA

Customizing UI with Lightning components

  • Classic pages vs Lightning pages

Classic pages are compiled on the server and sent to a client as an HTML markup. When a line item is changed, an entire page is sent to the server.

Lightning pages are assembled on the client from component definitions. When a line item is changed, just the message that is sent to the server is limited to the data required.

  • Lightning component structure
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Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS) provides:

  • Design Guidelines
  • CSS Framework
  • Component Blueprints
  • Styling Utilities
  • Design Tokens
  • Icons

Block Element Modifier naming in SLDS

.house { block or component name }

.house__door { element or component part }

.house_red { modifier or component variation }

.house__door_white { variation of a component part }

Example: .slds-text-heading_large

Base components

  • These are the Building blocks that make up the Lightning experience user interface.
  • These components talk to Salesforce via Apex.
  • ‘init’ event is used to ‘Bootstrap’ the component

Lightning Data Service

  • Use Lightning Data service to Create, Edit or Delete in the lightning component without the need to write Apex.
  • Benefits of LDS include no Apex, no, built-in FLS and sharing, auto-notify on record changes, declarative CRUD operations.
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Events and Actions

The lightning framework uses Events to communicate data between components. Events are triggered by User actions such as a click of a button.

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The overall experience of the workshop

The exercises involved create a reusable lightning component that is plugged into a record page that dynamically refreshes when the data on the record page is changed.

This Use case is closer to the real-life scenario and developers can relate it to some of the examples they encounter in everyday work.

Although most of the content used in the workshop is available on multiple websites, this session stands out due to the effective way of explaining concepts behind Lightning features.

And since it was a hands-on session, participants had a chance to discuss and understand the functionality of each block of code.

Working with a group is always a joy and when you are stuck somewhere or missed a point, other participants were ready to help.

Due to the length of the workshop, it was possible to maintain slow pace while trying to complete the exercise giving enough time for everyone to complete.

I would encourage every developer to attend workshops like these because the instructors are the people behind these products and they know firsthand how it works and why it was designed that way.

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