As you might know, if you have ever watched my Admin to Admin Academy Podcast, I strongly believe that formulas are the superpowers of any #AwesomeAdmin! And for #AmbitiousAdmins… well we keep taking more steps and begin dabbling with Flow variables, and even Apex Code. There is no barrier we won’t cross when we have a burning desire to bring the best solutions to our organization!
So this year at Dreamforce 2015 I was honored to co-present with the amazing Kieren Jameson of WomenCodeHeroes.com, in a session titled “Workflow Rule Formulas as a Gateway to Coding”, to help #AmbitiousAdmin’s interested in learning more about code. In this session, we used my BMO Use Case and held a live 3-round competition of clicks vs. code, showing the audience how workflow rule formulas compare to working with Apex Code.
And the key takeaway…
“Admins, PLEASE DON’T FEAR THE CODE!!”
While this battle of clicks vs. code ended in a draw, because there is a time a place where each solution is a better fit or more practical, it was clear that any admin can learn to code once the similarities are highlighted! This is great news… it means you don’t have to wait to get started on your own journey of becoming comfortable with editing or reading a trigger… and can even create your own!
The only thing you have to lose is an opportunity to grow (and to implement really rad solutions that might get you that raise or promotion you were hoping for…)!
Just follow these steps to get started now. Take your time, this is not a race, do each step in this order and see what happens:
- Download the BMO Use Case document and develop your free developer org to match the org we used for this session! Look here for more details about this use case and the expectations.
- Download the session deck here. Read through the requirements we were designing for (aka the “Rounds”) and then go to the appendix to see all the code/workflows we used.
- Go through and create all of the APEX Triggers to match our work! Then test your work to make sure the design is work (if you create the workflow rules too, I recommend creating and testing them first to make sure they work before adding the code. This way you can deactivate the workflow rules as you add in the code so that the workflows are not giving you false positives when testing your code!)
- Notice the comment lines in the code which explain what each line of code is doing! This will help you to use this code as a starting point and start replacing the code with your own field names, etc.. You can even do this in your sandbox as you try to apply the code to your real life use-case at your work!
- Now you are ready to read Kieren’s entire blog series called Cooking with Code. These posts (13 of them as of the time of writing this article) literally cover everything you need to start connecting all the dots about how to start working with Apex Code. I highly recommend starting from the very first post at the bottom of the page and working your way up the list!
- Let us know your experiences at the Admin to Admin Academy group on the success community… and if you have ANY questions we will help you out… all you have to is post them in the group
- BONUS: my understanding is that all sessions were recorded and will be available on YouTube so as soon as I have this information/link I will share it here so you can watch the session!!!
