Forcelandia 2019 XML & JSON Conference Talk Resources

31 Jul 2019 🔖 salesforce xml json
💬 EN

Slides (PDF), links, etc. from my “Forcelandia” Salesforce community conference talk
XML & JSON For Total Beginners

Slides

Click Here to download a PDF of the slides

Shameless Plug

I’m speaking about Apex-Defined Data Types for Flow Variables at 7AM PDT / 10AM EDT in a live webinar as a guest of Apex Hours on Saturday, August 3, 2019.

• I toured the technology for admins in June (YouTube here); this webinar will have more code on the screen, but not too much for an eager “admineloper” to follow.

To get the link and a reminder to tune into the livestream, RSVP here.
(The Zoom link might actually be right on that page by the time you see this message. It wasn’t when I wrote this page.)

If you can’t make it live, stay tuned to Apex Hours on YouTube to catch up!

Recap

1. XML & JSON are just punctuation standards for typing data as plain text. They’re not programming languages.
2. Both standards have enough complexity to the allowed punctuation to enable you to type up complicated “shapes” of data like “lists of lists.”
3. Because they allow data can be so complex, they’re often the data standard of choice for “fancy” configuration-file and data transfer in cloud environments like Salesforce, Pardot, & MarketingCloud.
   • (The cloud also loves them because line breaks aren’t a part of either standard, and line breaks don’t reliably transmit from your computer to a cloud computer or vice-versa.)

Links

• My “zero to hero” tutorial on actually reading and writing XML and JSON, broken into 7 “read on the bus”-size chunks
• Background: XML and JSON are often used to transmit data to/from services in the cloud over “HTTP APIs”, so…
  • What’s an API?
  • What’s HTTP?
• Downloading & Uploading Salesforce Metadata XML with VSCode – a tutorial (this is “learning recommendation #1” for admins!)
• My Stories: Here are a few ways I’ve reconfigured software I use by editing the contents of the XML or JSON files they depend upon:
  • Duplicating Salesforce flow parts, without code, by downloading “metadata” XML, hand-editing it, and uploading it again
  • Keeping DemandTools deduplication “scenarios” synchronized with each other, by hand, by copying and pasting XML from one file to another on my computer
  • A “DIY Data Loader” I built for Pardot, with code, that downloaded my data as JSON, edited it, and re-uploaded it to Pardot
• Beautifiers:
  • For XML, if the contents aren’t a secret – try “Beautify” & “Tree Viewer”
  • For XML, when you have secret/corporate data: Try Notepad++ text editor with “Tidy2” plugin for “beautifying” alongside native View -> “Fold All” + Collapse/Uncollapse (or sidebar +’s and -‘s) functionality for “tree viewing”.
    Click Plugins -> Tidy2 -> Edit Config 1 and change input-xml: no to input-xml: yes before first use.
    Click Plugins -> Tidy2 -> Tidy (Config 1) to “beautify” an XML document (spread it out on multiple lines and auto-indent it)
  • For JSON, if the contents aren’t a secret – try “Beautify” & “Tree Viewer”
  • For JSON, when you have secret/corporate data: Try Notepad++ text editor with “JSTool” plugin for “beautifying” alongside native View -> “Fold All” + Collapse/Uncollapse (or sidebar +’s and -‘s) functionality for “tree viewing”.
    Click Plugins -> JSTool -> JSFormat to “beautify” an JSON document (spread it out on multiple lines and auto-indent it)
• Documentation: Salesforce’s official “Metadata API” documentation
  • Warning: Sometimes this documentation labels a component of “what Salesforce metadata looks like” one thing (e.g. “FlowVariable”) but it’ll appear in actual XML files you download from Salesforce under a slightly different name (e.g. “<Variable>“).
• Documentation: How Pardot’s official HTTP API expects you to transmit data to/from Pardot
• Documentation: The MarketingCloud API instruction manual. Godspeed. 😬

Abstract

If you’ve used the Salesforce Data Loader, you’ve used CSV files. You know … spreadsheets so simple you can open them with a text editor instead of Excel. Not everything in your Salesforce org is spreadsheet-shaped. Like your org’s setup. You can download, edit, and upload text files representing your org’s configuration too — but these files are very different from the CSVs you’re used to.

Demystify the XML and JSON file formats: learn to read them at a glance and how they’re used to solve problems in Salesforce, Pardot, and MarketingCloud. Even if you never write them, a bit of familiarity can make you a better solutions architect and give you a peek into your devs’ world for better collaboration and faster brainstorming. Now that’s admineloping!