One of my favorite Star Trek TNG episodes is - In Theory. It’s the one where Data learns about love. This post has nothing to do with that, but I like the title because I used to think In Theory the Schema Builder was great, but in practice it left much to be desired. I think it is good for trying to understand the relationship between objects in an org. I never really used it to create objects and fields.
A few weeks ago I watched a presentation on Building Artifacts from Requirements and it gave me some new appreciation for the Schema Builder. Building artifacts seems to be a common theme on the journey to being a CTA. I need to learn and start building artifacts if I am going to be an architect and one way to practice is to build the artifacts for existing orgs. This helps me with my day job by understanding the data model and gets me used to building them.
The advantage of doing it on the existing org is that I know what it will look like when I am done. It’s like being assigned a homework problem and having the answer in the back of the book. It might also help me find ways to improve things. I am seeing a push to start doing things off-platform from Salesforce and the artifact might help identify areas where this might be an option.
The first step is to figure out which tool to use. I have access to Visio for work, but I do a lot of stuff on my personal laptop so I need something that is free. The presentation suggested Lucid chart or Draw.io.
I am going to explore Draw.io first since it is free. Just because something is free, doesn’t mean it is bad. Remember the 82nd Rule of Acquisition - The flimsier the product, the higher the price.
No comments:
Post a Comment