Month: July 2018

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API to Create a Sandbox Org

Some weeks ago I published my first try  with Tooling API where I could explain how to create a Custom field with this API, but when I worked on that, what I really needed was to create a Sandbox programatically. OMG!! A Sandbox!! And how can I do it?

At the end, a Sandbox is metadata, and as we learnt on my previous blog, Tooling API will help you to create metadata records. SandboxInfo is the object that represents a Sandbox, and we will use it to create our new environment.

SandboxInfo supports Get, Post, Patch and Delete REST API calls, that means, that with Post we will create a new Sandbox, with Patch we will do an update, a refresh at the end, and the Delete would remove the organization.

As you can see in the link there are lot of options when you create a Sandbox, like create the copy Chatter from production to Sandbox, or event it gives you the option to use Template to create the org. But if you need a simple environment, with below JSON body is more than enough:

{
   "Description": "New Test Sandbox",
   "HistoryDays": 0,
   "LicenseType": "DEVELOPER",
   "SandboxName": "SandboxTest"
}

And in order to execute it you can make a Post REST call with this url:

/services/data/v42.0/tooling/sobjects/SandboxInfo

This call will return an Id that you can use in order to check the creation progress via another object, SandboxProcess. You can perform a query against this object filtering by SandboxInfoId field, and get useful information such us CopyProgress that represents how much of the copy has been already performed.

Finally I would like to remind you that you could only make this call against a Production org, and if your user has the rights to create Sandboxes. Otherwise, it will fail.

 

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From Attachment to File via Flow?

Some days ago I got a message asking me if it was possible to move from Attachments to Files in Salesforce using the #clicksnotcode tool VisualFlow and after some researches I would say no, this is not possible without code. But if you find the way, please, please, please, leave me a message so that I can update this post.

So, what is this post about? My researches and how I got that the answer is no.

First of all, the use case. As you know we cannot create Attachments in Lightning Experience, only Files are available in LEX, so anything that we want to keep should be also migrated.

But how?

  • Manually? That could be a really expensive option, and tired, to be honest.
  • Via code? Yes!! I like this option. At the end, a File is a Salesforce Object, ContentVersion , and as you can find on this blog, with a really simple piece of code you can create a new File record. Below piece adds the query to an attachment. After that, find the image with the new file and also the result of a query done in  Workbench.
List<Attachment> attList = [SELECT 
                               Body,BodyLength,Name,ParentId 
                            FROM Attachment limit 1];
Attachment att = attList.get(0);

String fileContent = att.body.toString();
ContentVersion conVer = new ContentVersion();
conVer.PathOnClient = 'MigratedFile.txt';
conVer.Title = 'MigratedFile.txt';
conVer.Description = att.Name + ' migrated';
conVer.VersionData = EncodingUtil.base64Decode(fileContent);
conVer.FirstPublishLocationId = '001B000000hYespIAC'; 
insert conVer;

Captura de pantalla 2018-06-28 a las 17.15.33

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And what about VisualFlow?

I created something really simple, 4 steps flow. But it has a welcome and a thanks screen, so actually the job is done in 2 steps.

Captura de pantalla 2018-06-28 a las 17.30.46

First one is Record Lookup where I retrieve the single attachment that I have in my organization. Please, keep in mind that if you have a list of Attachments, and use a Record Lookup, it will return a single record, but if your idea is to retrieve all attachments, you need to use a Fast Record Lookup step.

Captura de pantalla 2018-06-28 a las 17.31.10

This step is going to store data into the variable that I created, and all of them are similar, Text variables.

Captura de pantalla 2018-06-28 a las 17.31.48

The second step is to create the ContentVersion record, assigning the variable data that I got on the previous step.

Captura de pantalla 2018-06-28 a las 17.32.00

And that is all. Yes, so simple.

However, when I run it I got an error and this email where I can see that there is an issue on VersionData field.

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The reason is simple. Attachment Body returns a Blob that I need to convert into String in order to be able to encode and pass to the Content file.

....
String fileContent = att.body.toString();
....
conVer.VersionData = EncodingUtil.base64Decode(fileContent);
....

Is there a way to fix it? No as far as I could find. My first idea was to check what the variable was returning, adding a middle step to show the body value

Captura de pantalla 2018-06-28 a las 17.55.06

And as I expected that is not my body text

Captura de pantalla 2018-06-28 a las 17.54.46

So the next thought was to try to create a formula in flow or make any transform, something that could help me, but I couldn’t find any.

Captura de pantalla 2018-06-28 a las 17.51.16

So I think that the only way to do it is via some Apex code. We can create a class that has InvocableMethod annotation and do the transform there and call the class as it was an step, but, to be honest, why do I want to do it when I can run the whole transform from an apex class as I explained before?

At the end, I would advice to create your own ApexClass that execute the process to do the migration if you do not want to use the tool that Salesforce provides.

Good luck!!