Tooling Around with the Tooling API

Nerd alert! My Dreamforce developer session, “Tooling Around with the Tooling API” is Thursday, November 21 at 10:45am in the Mobile Theater. In the thirty minutes we’ll have to spend together, we’ll take a look at what the Tooling API is, why it’s kinda like the movie Inception, and make it do as many cool tricks as possible. I’ll demo some automatic code generation and a tool I’ve been working on called “The Documenter”, a fresh new way to review and analyze your Apex code.

Care to join? Register in the Dreamforce org.

Wanna follow along? Grab the Github repo.

Can’t make it? Here’s a preview of what’s to come:

First, I’ll try to crack the nut and explain the process of saving code through the Tooling API in terms of writing, saving, packaging, and compiling code.

Compiling code with the Tooling API – piece of cake, upside down!

Then, we’ll use that knowledge to automatically generate some Apex Triggers. Contrived? Maybe… unless you use something like the Enterprise Pattern and follow the best practice of making your Apex Triggers as minimal as possible.

After that, I’ll show you the moving parts of SymbolTable, the very-awesome code parser that is part of the Tooling API. Suffice to say the data model is a bit complex, but filled with useful data when analyzing your code.

Ye Olde Royal SymbolTable Eye Chart

Finally, I’ll show you “The Documenter” in action. Here’s a sneak peek:

You can read more about sessions Red Argyle presented at Dreamforce 13 here.