Daily Learnings: Mon, Nov 11, 2024
The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today. — H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Learnings from Trailhead Continuous Ed
I’ve been putting off the Trailhead continuous education that’s required to maintain my Salesforce credentials for a while. Given much of it is due in December, I made some time to get caught up on a lot of it today. As always, I found some really interesting nuggets while going through the updates to the platform.
Headless Identity APIs & the UVID
TIL about the Headless Identity APIs offered by Salesforce to allow for authentication and authorization run on the SFDC platform, but for off-platform applications.
Recently, SFDC released the ability to use these APIs for tracking unauthenticated users that eventually sign up or authenticate, to capture insights about user interactions while they’re still unknown. This is all powered by a Unique Visitor ID or UVID that SFDC generates for you, which you can then pass into the registration or authentication flow when appropriate. This does require that you leverage a JWT-based access token.
No-Authentication Named Credentials
In the Winter ‘24 release, Salesforce finally allows for setting up Named / External Credentials that are for APIs / endpoints that explicitly don’t have any auth required.
Salesforce Email Fields & International Characters
TIAL that, by default, Salesforce email fields cannot store “non-Latin” characters. I.e., you cannot store jóhn@johnturner.dev as a value in an Email-type field. These fields are encoded and stored as ASCII by default, and data loads imported into Salesforce with internationalized characters will fail.
However, there is a setting that you can enable that will allow for internationalized email addresses to be stored in Salesforce. Further, you can then send emails / receive emails from internationalized email addresses (pending some limitations).
More on the topic, including considerations, can be found here.