Optimizing Salesforce Industries Solutions on the Vlocity OmniStudio Platform: Implementing OmniStudio best practices for achieving maximum performance

Optimizing Salesforce Industries Solutions on the Vlocity OmniStudio Platform

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First published: March 2024

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Contributors

About the author

Dmitri Khanine is a certified Vlocity and OmniStudio developer, trainer, and consultant based in Canada. He has spent the last 7 years of his over 25-year-long IT career focusing exclusively on Salesforce Industries.

Dmitri combines training with hands-on development, creating industry apps with OmniStudio. This keeps his skills sharp and ensures he never runs out of fresh tips, tricks, and trade secrets.

The recipe for Dmitri’s training success is simple. He gives students a complete view of the OmniStudio platform, followed by best practices and anti-patterns, and then takes it a step further by showing an actual percent improvement that each best practice is expected to bring.

"There’s no point in repeating what can be easily found in online documentation in under 5 minutes, says Dmitri, It’s the tips and tricks that people are interested in."

Dmitri is available for a limited number of training, speaking, and consulting engagements and can be contacted at [email protected].

About the reviewers

Sam Lienpanich is a recognized expert in Salesforce OmniStudio, specializing in Communications Cloud, CPQ, and Billing. With a robust background that intersects technology, innovation, and strategic implementation, Sam has dedicated his career to mastering and advancing the capabilities of Salesforce Industries and OmniStudio. His technical acumen and solution-oriented approach have set industry standards, particularly in his roles that span from a pivotal tenure at Oracle, Vlocity, and Salesforce. As the Salesforce Industries Global Lead at Sabio Group, a Premier Salesforce Partner, Sam leads the strategic development and execution of Salesforce Industries solutions, with a particular emphasis on telecommunications companies. He is highly regarded for his leadership in OmniStudio development, where his innovative methods establish benchmarks for scalable, efficient, and transformative solutions. Sam is dedicated to upholding and promoting best practices in OmniStudio development, ensuring that his team consistently delivers superior quality and groundbreaking results in their projects.

I would like to express my appreciation to the author for crafting such an insightful and informative book. Heartfelt thanks to my family for their love and support during this review process. I am also grateful to Sabio Group for providing me with the opportunity to review this book, underscoring their commitment to continuous learning and professional growth.

Rathin Mojumdar has over 24 years of experience as a seasoned Professional Services Leader and CRM professional. Throughout his career, he has successfully led CRM, data, and AI projects across diverse business environments, facilitating companies in achieving enhanced business agility and optimal customer satisfaction, and delivering niche business value propositions with a remarkable return on investment. His focus extends to assisting clients in their digital transformation journey, offering top-notch CRM/Industry Cloud solutions seamlessly integrated with ERP, mobile, social, and various other cloud applications. This integration results in a comprehensive omnichannel experience across both digital and traditional channels. His expertise encompasses a range of specialties, including CRM solutions, digital transformation, cloud architecture, solution design/IT strategy and framework development, managing complex implementations, building and overseeing cross-functional teams, system integration, and the formulation of enablement and transformation roadmaps.

Table of Contents

Preface

Part 1: The Platform Overview

1

Understanding the Vlocity OmniStudio Platform

Technical requirements

What is OmniStudio?

Digital Interaction Platform

The Salesforce Industries Process Library

Digital Experience Layer

Service Management Layer

Developer Experience Layer

Summary

2

A Sample Application

Technical requirements

Hands-on lab – creating an OmniScript

Creating an OmniScript

Adding steps

Creating a DataRaptor

OmniScript preview

Adding a FlexCard

Adding a FlexCard to an OmniScript

Summary

Part 2: Getting to Know the Tools

3

Evaluating the Performance of an OmniStudio Implementation

Technical requirements

Measuring execution times in OmniStudio

Execution times in DataRaptors

Execution times in Integration Procedures

Execution times in OmniScripts

Exploring the OmniStudio Tracking Service

Enabling tracking for OmniStudio

Adding custom fields to event tracking

Collecting stats and errors

Salesforce debug logs

Collecting debug logs in production

Process Profiler in IDX Workbench

Vlocity Error Log

Summary

4

An Introduction to Load Testing

Technical requirements

Why and how to do load testing

General considerations

Salesforce Performance Assistant

Running your load test

Using Selenium for load testing

Load testing with JMeter

Summary

5

Tracking Code Changes and Deployment

Technical requirements

Using the out-of-the-box export and import tools

Exporting Integration Procedures and OmniScripts

Extracting metadata with the Vlocity Build tool

Downloading the Vlocity Build tool

Running the Vlocity Build tool

Exporting Vlocity metadata

Deploying Vlocity metadata

Generating a Vlocity Manifest

Using Salesforce’s SFDX tool

Other OmniStudio configuration management tools

Salesforce Vlocity Integration VS Code extension

IDX Workbench

CI tools

Summary

Part 3: Best Practices for Improving Performance

6

Options for Async Execution

Technical requirements

Why to consider async code execution

Async configuration options for Integration Procedures

Chainable

Queueable Chainable setting

Chain On Step

How to call long-running Integration Procedures from the code

Calling from Apex

Calling from an LWC

Async execution options in Apex

Apex @future annotation

Queueable Apex

Batch Apex

Scheduled Apex

Summary

7

Understanding Caching

Technical requirements

What’s with all the caching?

Manual caching options

Caching in the Salesforce platform

Caching options in DataRaptors

Cache blocks in Integration Procedures

Caching the response of the entire Integration Procedure

Caching with the Lightning Wire service

Custom caching on the client side

Summary

8

Non-Selective Queries and Data Skew

Technical requirements

Case study – when an indexed field performs slower than a non-indexed one

Selective and non-selective queries

Optimizing queries with the Query Plan tool

Understanding data skew

Summary

9

Improving the Performance of the Service Layer

Technical requirements

Client or server side?

DataRaptors or an Integration Procedure?

Integration Procedure or server calls

Comparing relationship notation and multiple extract steps

Using multiple extract steps

Using relationship notation

Boosting performance by trimming the response JSON

DataRaptors

Integration Procedures

How fast the Turbo Extract DataRaptor really is

Summary

10

Improving the Performance of the Presentation Layer

Technical requirements

Performance impact of OmniScript best practices

Performance impact of formulas on OmniScripts

Performance impact of conditional views in OmniScripts

Performance impact of merge fields in OmniScripts

Measuring the performance of the Presentation Layer

Measuring load times with LWC Debug Mode

Measuring performance with Selenium

Consider LWC lifecycle events

Document generation options

Summary

11

DataRaptor Formula Performance Considerations

Technical requirements

How fast are DataRaptor formulas?

The QUERY function or another Extract?

Limiting custom function payload size

Summary

12

OmniStudio Performance Anti-Patterns

Technical requirements

DML, API, and Remote Action calls from Loop Block

Better solutions

Integration Procedure running after an error

Better solutions

Non-selective queries in DataRaptors

Wildcards in Filter criteria

Use of NULL values

Use of EXCLUDES and NOT LIKE operators

Summary

Index

Other Books You May Enjoy

Preface

OmniStudio is the engine behind customized, industry-specific offerings that run on the new part of the Salesforce platform called Salesforce Industries. It was originally built by Vlocity (who pioneered the concept of the Industry Cloud) and was acquired by Salesforce in 2020.

While each industry has its common business processes, the OmniStudio platform along with the Industries data model offers the tools and components that support all types of industries, saving new and existing customers months and even years of development. Industries have really never been more important, says Salesforce Co-CEO Bret Taylor, highlighting that these offerings provide customers with quicker time to value.

In 2022, Salesforce called Industries one of its three strategic growth pillars, along with Customer 360 and the company’s geographic expansion. The platform then continued to grow rapidly, and it is currently supporting 15 industries—up from 6 just 3 years ago at the time of the acquisition of Vlocity.

However, as out-of-the-box solutions are customized and new apps are developed, clients often face performance and scalability issues. Just like with any new technology where the best practices and design patterns are still being refined, Salesforce Industries solutions built with OmniStudio may underperform or crumble under load.

This book provides a foolproof system built on a set of proven best practices, tools, and specific metrics of improved performance and scalability. It will benefit administrators, developers, hands-on application architects, and business professionals involved with Salesforce Industries solutions.

Beginning with the 1,000-foot view, zooming in on the performance and scalability issues of its key components, the book will provide critical insights, helping you deliver better-performing and more reliable OmniStudio apps.

While some of these performance-related best practices are available, they are often scattered across different sources. The coherent system presented in this book, as well as the never-published performance assessments and anti-patterns, will help you achieve better results faster.

Who this book is for

This book offers technical guidance to IT professionals, administrators, developers, and hands-on application architects who are involved in Salesforce Industries projects. Whether looking to enhance existing Vlocity OmniStudio systems or embark on a new implementation journey, this book is your roadmap to better performance and scalability.

While a basic understanding of the OmniStudio platform is sufficient to benefit from some of the chapters, administrator and developer-level experience would help you get the maximum benefit from this book.

What this book covers

Chapter 1

, Understanding the Vlocity OmniStudio Platform, starts with the 1,000-foot view of Vlocity OmniStudio, which will drive home the overall vision behind the platform and how the components are designed to work together. This knowledge will make it easier to diagnose problems and improve the performance of your OmniStudio apps.

Chapter 2

, A Sample Application, offers a quick hands-on refresher, where you will be able to touch a lot of the OmniStudio moving parts so that you are better prepared for the chapters ahead.

Chapter 3

, Evaluating the Performance of an OmniStudio Implementation, provides a hands-on overview of the key tools and techniques for measuring the performance of OmniStudio components. These tools will come in handy before, during, and after the improvements are implemented.

Chapter 4

, An Introduction to Load Testing, continues where the previous chapter left off by looking at load testing and exploring the tools, tips, and best practices available for simulating real-life load on the system. This will help you measure the capacity, performance, and scalability of your OmniStudio apps and get ready to handle the expected customer demands.

Chapter 5

, Tracking Code Changes and Deployment, presents the tools and techniques that will make it easy to see, track, and reverse code and configuration changes in your system. These tools will allow you to adjust to better performance with complete peace of mind.

Chapter 6

, Options for Async Execution, discusses the best place to start by focusing on the area where a simple configuration change could produce massive performance improvement with just a few clicks. This chapter provides several options and step-by-step guidance for applying them.

Chapter 7

, Understanding Caching, reviews the second tool that can produce large performance gains quickly. In this chapter, we will explore the caching architecture of OmniStudio and the underlying Salesforce platform and how it can be applied to speed things up.

Chapter 8

, Non-Selective Queries and Data Skew, reviews a frequent reason for sub-standard performance in DataRaptors and Integration Procedures. While the first instinct usually is to blame OmniStudio, the issue may often originate in the underlying queries we’re running. In this chapter, you will find an example query on an indexed field that may run slower than one on a non-indexed field. We will then explore the reasons and look at the tools we can use to improve performance and prepare our apps for increasing data volumes.

Chapter 9

, Improving the Performance of the Service Layer, offers a few quick, sure-fire ways to spot and improve sub-standard performance in the OmniStudio Service layer: Integration Procedures and DataRaptors.

Chapter 10

, Improving the Performance of the Presentation Layer, explores the ways to spot and improve sub-standard performance in the OmniStudio Presentation layer: OmniScripts and FlexCards. This chapter also looks at the impact that some of the recommended Presentation layer best practices may have on our applications.

Chapter 11

, DataRaptor Formula Performance Considerations, reviews the out-of-the-box and custom Apex-based formula performance considerations and different options available to improve the performance of formulas in our DataRaptors and Integration Procedures.

Chapter 12

, OmniStudio Performance Anti-Patterns, introduces the concept of OmniStudio anti-patterns and reviews three common anti-patterns, the negative performance and scalability effects they may have on your apps, and ways to avoid them.

To get the most out of this book

To get the most out of this book, you should have some developer-level understanding of the Salesforce platform. Basic knowledge of Salesforce Objects, SOQL Queries, and some understanding of Apex and governor limits is assumed as these are foundational for developing and improving the performance of applications built on the Salesforce platform.

Some developer-level familiarity with OmniStudio is required to get the most out of Part 3 of the book. Furthermore, a basic understanding of HTML and Chrome Developer Tools would be beneficial to get the most out of Chapter 10

, Improving the Performance of the Presentation Layer.

There are many short code snippets in this book provided solely for demonstration purposes, and you do not need to execute them directly to understand them. That said, it is recommended to practice the topics discussed in the book in a sandbox with a recent version of OmniStudio installed.

The following is the software covered in the book:

Salesforce platform/Sales Cloud

Salesforce Industries/OmniStudio

You will find a list of the supported browsers and devices at https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.getstart_browsers_sfx.htm&type=5

Note

As OmniStudio is still very new, Salesforce is actively updating documentation as we speak and some of the links we have placed in this book may no longer work when you will be reading it. If this happens, please use the search feature in Salesforce documentation.

Disclaimer on images

Some images in this title are presented for contextual purposes, and the readability of the graphic is not crucial to the discussion. Please refer to our free graphic bundle to download the images. You can download the images from https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781835468470_ColorImages.pdf

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: To call an Integration Procedure from Apex, use the runIntegrationService method of the IntegrationProcedureService class.

A block of code is set as follows:

Map ipOutput =

(Map ) omnistudio.IntegrationProcedureService

   .runIntegrationService(

     'sample_IPCalculate',

     new Map (),

     new Map ()

   );

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

error: You have uncommitted work pending. Commit or rollback before calling out

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in