As we all know, Feature flags is a not-so-new concept in programming and devOps strategies. They provide many benefits as:
- Separate deployments from releases.
- Mitigate deployment risks.
- Testing in production (yes, tdddhe last and necessary round).
- Manage access to specific users on beta releases.
- Dark launches: features that won’t be used in production until they are finished and working properly.
- Canary release: release a feature for just a few users to test it in prod.
You can even sell this idea to marketing for A/B experiments on Partner Communities or Customer communities in Salesforce.
But to keep it simple and stright to the point, I made a project in a Developer org, so my use case is simple and I tried to make it financial-oriented to keep it interesting.
Let's say there was a requirement to create a LWC to show the accounts credit scoring. The scope includes to list a few fields and show a bar chart comparing the client score and the media score for that industry. But off course, it can't be done in just one sprint, because it needs to query a webservice to get the MediaScore ... So we can approach this with a layered solution.
- First, we can deploy the MVC which includes the LWC and a few fields.
- Second, we can deploy whatever we finished on the chart part.
- And third, we can modify the chart to show the queried media score (on this topic, I created and deployed in a free host, a tiny webservice made in Rust that returns the media score per industry)
Please read the code (accountDetails LWC, scoreChart LWC, ScoreChartController and ScoreChartControllerTest apex classes) because ... the truth is always on code
In the second episode I'll add fflib, Nebula Logger and dependency injection to illustrate how to use them in a more complex scenario.
- Request your Salesforce Developer Org here
- Install the Pablo Gonzalez Feature Flags project on it.
- Install the code on this repository.
- You must add the LWC control 'accountDetails' into the Account Record page (preferrably below the compact layout). (open any account record, go to the wheel, then Edit Page and drag & drop the accountDetail LWC into the layout)
- You'd want to run scripts/bash/wskeepalive.sh since the free service I used for the PoC (render.com) spins down the webservice due to inactivity.