Welcome back to Red Argyle’s Developer Content Briefing. We’re excited to take a closer look at this Summer’s fresh new items coming to our organizations this July!
Similar to our Spring ‘20 briefing we will highlight the features updates related to core areas specifically relevant to Salesforce Development.
For this release, we will highlight:
CSS
Share CSS Styles Among Lightning Web Components
This update will allow developers to share CSS between many components. Before this Summer ‘20 change, developers had to rely on making their style changes between each LWC. With many components, this would become a very lengthy process.
This change opens up the ability to use @import ‘namespace/moduleName’;
This improvement will allow projects to maintain few “CSS modules” that will create drag-n-drop style to various custom components. This could mean an easy to use Bootstrap CSS module, or Material Design CSS module that can be used throughout a project. Any changes made to this module will be reflected across each component that uses it.
Many of the projects we work on at Red Argyle require a team of developers. This can lead to inconsistent CSS styles across different front-end components. With CSS modules, we will now be able to easily use these modules to allow for a more consistent style within projects and across our clients organizations.
Security Updates
Restricted Access to @AuraEnabled Apex Methods Based on User Profile
This new security alert is related to a critical update released in Winter ‘20. With this new update enabled, authenticated, guest, and portal users will only be able to access @AuraEnabled Apex methods if their user profile has access to the Apex class.
This is a significant security update. At Red Argyle we work on a significant amount of Community Cloud implementations. Providing an additional portal for users to log into requires additional scrutiny and hardening around security. This update continues to lock down guest user access and profile configuration around communities.
Check User Permissions for Lightning Web Components
Permissions and custom permissions can now be easily accessed from within Lightning Web Components, similar to the way that @AuraEnabled methods are imported. This makes it easier to change what users can see and do in your component based on their permissions.
The Check User Permissions updates follow in the same vein as the Spring 20 Releases’ isAccessible. Having developed hundreds of Lightning Components at Red Argyle, we have built standards for how we check permissions and user’s access. The Check User Permissions update will quickly find itself in our Lightning Web Components standards.
Flow Triggers
On the code-lite side of Salesforce development, Process Builders have been a go-to for executing actions when a record is inserted or changed. These actions can range from things like simply stamping a field on a record to more complicated tasks like updating fields on children’s records based on conditions and then sending emails based on that. However, they still have a limit on what they can easily achieve.
On the flip side, Flows have really come a long way over the years. Now allowing much more complex actions and processes and pushing its capabilities closer and closer to raw Apex code. The secret behind these two is that they are, in reality, the same thing. Process Builder is a simple and accessible UI built on top of Flows. The main functional difference between the two being that Process Builders can be run similarly to Apex Triggers, such as when a record is inserted or changed.
The new addition of Flow Triggers brings that same capability to Flows. With this feature, we can now trigger Flows from records, giving us the ability to write more complex actions around our data. While there will always be scenarios where the complexity necessitates some Apex, this goes a long way to greatly expand our code-lite toolbelt. Heck, you could even throw some Apex Invocables in your Flow Trigger if need be. As for Process Builders, they can still serve their purpose as simple solutions to simple problems, but we now have access to a chainsaw where before we only had a pocket knife.
Did this article leave you wanting to know more about how we can help your organization? Contact us for more information!
