Salesforce Developer Interview FAQs

Salesforce Developer Interview FAQs

Preparing for a Salesforce Developer interview requires a strong understanding of Salesforce platform, Apex programming language, and various development tools and methodologies. Here are some frequently asked questions that you might encounter in a Salesforce Developer interview: 

1) What are the skills required to become a Salesforce Developer?

Answer: A Salesforce Developer is the one with the basic knowledge of the Salesforce platform. They can become a Salesforce Administrator, at a later stage of the career. The developer must know how does Salesforce works.

 2) What is a Custom Object in Salesforce?

Answer: Custom Objects are nothing but database tables and are the objects created by you for the storage of information on a company or industry. While building a custom object, the Salesforce platform automatically builds things such as page layouts, etc for user interfaces.

 3) How does Salesforce deploy Sales Tracking?

Answer: Salesforce records data on details such as sales numbers, customer details, repeat customers & customers served and use these to create detailed reports, charts, and dashboards. This way it keeps a track of sales in your organization.

 4) What is the difference between isNull and isBlank?

Answer: Use the ISBLANK() function for text fields. As text fields can never be NULL, even if nothing is provided as a value, ISNULL() function takes only an empty value. If ISNULL() is used with a text field then it returns false.

5) What is the limit of Data.com records which can be added to Salesforce?

Answer: In the Data.com user’s section, find your name to view your monthly limit. It will give details such as how many records are already added or exported for this month. The user goes to the Setup, enters the User in the Quick Find Box, and selects prospector users.

6) What is the difference between Role and Profile in Salesforce?

Answer: Roles allow to control the access to Salesforce and have an impact on reports. They have control over the visibility level of organizational users. The users of a specific role level can view, edit and report on all the data, shared/owned by the users who fall below the hierarchy.

Profiles are mandatory for all users. Profile controls the access to which records a user has in the Salesforce org. It is not possible for the users to work in the Salesforce org, without being assigned to a profile.

7) What are the Permission Sets? 

Answer: A permission set is a collection of settings and permissions for accessing various tools and functions in Salesforce. They are used for the extension of the user’s functional access, without any changes to the profiles. Users can have only one profile but multiple permission sets.

For Example, A set of users has the same profile called Sales Users. These users have the right to read, create and edit the leads. If some users need to transfer and delete leads, then a permission set is created here.

8) What is the use of SOQL? What are the differences between SOQL and SOSL?

Answer: The full form of  SOQL is Standard Object Query Language. SOQL evaluates to a single sObject and a list of many sObjects or an integer for count method queries. It is used to retrieve data from the Salesforce platform and resides inside Apex or Visualforce and returns a set of data.

9) What are Governor Limits? Give three examples.

Answer: Salesforce works in a multi-tenant environment and imposes runtime limits to have the same performance within the database. These are imposed by the Apex runtime engine and ensure that the code does not misbehave.

This way the developer is forced to write efficient, scalable code.

Here are some examples of Governor Limits:

• The total number of SOQL queries issued has a synchronous limit of 100 and an asynchronous limit of 200.
• The total number of records retrieved for Database getQueryLocator must be limited to 10,000.
• The total number of records retrieved by a single SOSL query is 2000.

10) What are Workflows in Salesforce? What are the types of Workflow?

Answer: Workflow in Salesforce is for automating the standard internal processes and procedures and thereby saving time across the organization. The main container for a set of workflow instructions is a Workflow Rule. It is possible to sum these instructions as an if/then statement.

There are two components of the workflow rule i.e. criteria and the action. The criteria are the ‘if’ part of the if/then statement and the action is the ‘then’ part of the if/then statement.

11) What is Object Relationship in Salesforce? What are Salesforce Relations?

Answer: In Salesforce, a related list allows us to connect standard and custom object records. This is the purpose served by an  object relationship. Various cases can be connected with specific customers through this. One can create a custom relationship too.

The object relations in Salesforce include:

• Many to many
• Master-Detail
• Lookup
• Hierarchical
• Indirect Lookup

12) What is Force.com Platform?

Answer:  Force.com is a Platform As A Service (PAAS) and simplifies the development and deployment of cloud-based applications and websites. The developers make use of the Integrated Development Environment or IDE to create apps and websites. Later, these are deployed in the multi-tenant servers of Force.com.

 13) What are the different types of reports that are available in Salesforce?

Answer: The different types of Salesforce Reports include:

• Tabular Report: It offers the fastest and simplest way to view your data. They have an ordered set of fields arranged in columns. They cannot create groups of data.
• Matrix Report: Here the grouping is done based on both rows and columns.
• Summary Report: Here the groups appear based on columns only.
• Joined Report: In this, two or more reports are joined in a single report.

14) What is Junction Object? What is it used for?

Answer: Junction objects are needed to build a many-to-many relationship among Salesforce objects.

  For Example, In a typical recruitment scenario, there are possibilities of creating many positions for candidates and at the same time, a candidate can apply for many positions.

The third object required for creating a data model is termed a junction object and in this example, it can be cited as a “job application”. Here, you need to use a lookup field for both position and candidate object on the junction object – which is a job application.

15) What is an Audit Trail?

Answer: Administrators need to make changes in the organizational setup.  Audit Trail history helps you to track the recent 20 changes that are made in setup, by multiple administrators.

 16) What is a Dashboard in Salesforce?

Answer: A dashboard as shown in the above figure summarizes and portrays your Salesforce data in a graphical layout. This offers insights at-a-glance, for any device and for any targeted audience. This figure, it throws light on the Sales reps of your organization.

Moreover, a dashboard visualizes your business scenario and allows you to make decisions based on the real-time data gathered from reports. A Dashboard has a page layout and displays multiple dashboard components. Multiple reports appear side-by-side on the same dashboard.

17) What is Sandbox org in Salesforce? What are the different types of Sandbox in Salesforce?

Answer: Sandboxes are for copies of the production organization. It is possible to make such multiple copies of the same environment that serve various purposes like development, testing, and training without any need for compromise of data in the production org.

As sandboxes are isolated from the production environment, operations performed in the sandbox have no impact on the production org.

There are four types of Salesforce Sandboxes as shown below:

• Developer Sandbox
• Developer Pro Sandbox
• Partial Data Sandbox
• Full Sandbox

18) What are the options for deploying from Sandbox to Production org? What is an Outbound Change Set?

Answer: Various methods are adopted for deploying a sandbox to production. The main method is using the Change Sets. A Change Set enables to creation and testing of a new object in the sandbox and then sending that to the production org. It contains information on the org and not on any data such as records.

The other methods to deploy sandbox to production org include Force.com IDE, unmanaged packages as well as ANT migration tools.

When sending customizations from the current org to another org the Outbound Change Set is used. Once received by the receiving org it is called Inbound Change Set.

19) What are Bucket Fields in Salesforce?

Answer: Bucket Fields categorize records in Salesforce reports without any need for a formula or a custom field. They exist only in the reports. When a bucket column is created then multiple categories of group report values.

 20) What is Custom Label in Salesforce? How many Custom Labels can you define and of what size?

Answer: Custom Labels enable developers to create multi-lingual applications. It automatically presents information as information or messages, by using the user’s native language. These are custom text values that are accessible from Apex classes, Lightning components, and Visualforce pages.

A minimum number of 5000 custom labels can be created for each organization. The size is about 1000 characters.

21) What is Data Skew in Salesforce?

Answer: The full form of SOQL is Standard Object Query Language. SOQL evaluates a condition in an enterprise when you require to work with say 10,000 records.

A single user owns a huge number of records and we call that “ownership data skew” and it causes performance issues while updating in Salesforce.

22) What are the differences between Workflow and Process Builder? What is the difference between Trigger and Process Builder?

Answer: Workflows and the  Process Builder are types of declarative automation tools that can extend the functionality of the Salesforce platform. They have functionalities and features which enable them to automate business processes.

Workflows can only handle four actions such as email alerts, outbound messages, task creation, and field updates. However, Process Builder has a huge number of functionalities such as creating a record, posting to Chatter, launching a flow, submitting approvals, and quick actions.

If a process earlier had different workflows for different outcomes, then the same can be accomplished now with one process.

Moreover, only single criteria are evaluated by a Workflow, before triggering the automation. On the contrary, the Process Builder can evaluate multiple criteria and trigger different automation and all this depend on the criteria met.

23) What are Sharing Rules?

Answer: Sharing rules extend sharing access to the users in roles, public groups, or territories. It gives greater access to the users by making automatic exceptions to the sharing settings for the entire org.

This can be based on record ownership or other criteria. It selects the records to share with the users and the level of access to be given to these users or groups.

   For Example, An account sharing rule can be created based on an account owner or any other criteria such as account type.

 24) What is the use of Custom Settings? What are the types of Custom Settings in Salesforce?

Answer: Custom Settings are similar to custom objects. The developers create custom data and associate custom data for an organizational profile or a specific user.

The exposure of custom data settings to the application cache is beneficial due to the efficient access with no need for the cost of repeated queries to the database. This data can be used by SOAP API, validation rule, or formula field.

The different types of Custom Settings in Salesforce include:

• Hierarchy type
• List type

25) What is the use of the Roll-up Summary Field and where can you use it?

Answer: Roll- up summary field can display a value in a master record based on the fields comprising the detail record. It creates values in related records such as those in the related lists. It can only be used in a master-detail relationship.

  For Example, The sum of all invoices can be calculated for all the related custom object records in the accounts invoice-related list.

 26) What is the difference between Page Layout and Record Type?

Answer: Page Layouts control the layout and organization of fields, buttons, visualforce, custom links, s-controls, and related lists on any object record pages. They determine which all fields are visible, read-only, and mandatory. You can customize the content of record pages for users with a Page Layout.

27) What is a Wrapper Class in Salesforce?

Answer: A Wrapper Class is defined as a class and a data structure. It is an abstract data type which has its instances formed by a collection of objects.

The basic nature is that of a custom object and is defined by the Wrapper class properties. It allows records to be checked from a list and processed for a specific action.

28) What is the difference between WhoID and WhatID?

Answer: WhoID refers to people such as contact or leads. Whereas “What ID” refers only to objects.

29) What is Apex?

Answer: Apex is an object-oriented programming language that enables the developers to execute flow and transaction control statements, on Salesforce servers in association with a call to an API.

It adds business logic to system events such as related record objects, button clicks, and Visualforce pages – with Java-like syntax and acts as a stored procedure.

30) What are Maps in Apex?

Answer: Mare used to store data in the form of key-value pairs, where each unique key maps to a single value.

Syntax: Map country_city = new Map();

31) What is an Apex Transaction?

Answer: An Apex transaction is a set of operations, that is executed as a single unit. These operations include DML operations that are responsible for querying records.

All the DML operations in a transaction get completed successfully or get completely rolled back if an error occurs even in saving a single record.