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Maintain Your Data Architect Certification for Winter ’23

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Enable Person Accounts without contacting Salesforce Support.
  • Learn the new name of Salesforce CDP.
  • Deliver to your customers with Custom Address Fields.
  • Filter your stream of Change Events.
Note

Important: In order to maintain your certification, you must complete all five units of this module.

Salesforce Certification

If you hold this Salesforce Architect certification, keep in mind that you need to complete this unit and the other 4 units in this module by the due date to maintain your certification. Another important part of maintaining your certification is ensuring your Trailhead and Webassessor accounts are linked.

Interested in learning more about getting certified? Check out all the Salesforce Architect certifications.

Protect the Integrity of Your Certification

The quality of our certification exams and the value our credentials provide are our highest priority. Protecting the security and confidentiality of our exams is essential to providing our customers with credentials that are respected and industry-leading.

As a participant of the Salesforce Certification Program, you’re required to accept the terms of the Salesforce Credential and Certification Program Agreement. Please review the Salesforce certification exam-taking policies in the Salesforce Credential and Certification Program Agreement and Code of Conduct Trailhead Help article for more details.

Salesforce introduced a ton of great feature enhancements over the past year. Let’s take a look at some of the more important ones.

Enable Person Accounts Without Contacting Salesforce Support

You can now enable Person Accounts without reaching out to Salesforce Support. Person accounts store information by combining certain account and contact fields into one record. This allows you to store information about a person in a record that can act like an account when necessary.

Where: Person accounts are available in Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer editions.

How: You can enable person accounts after you meet these prerequisites.

  • The account object has at least one record type.
  • User profiles that have read permission on accounts have read permission on contacts.
  • The organization-wide default sharing is set so that either Contact is Controlled by Parent or both Account and Contact are Private.
Note

Person accounts can’t be disabled after they’re enabled. Make sure you test the features in a sandbox to preview how the changes affect Salesforce and review the implications of enabling the feature. To enable person accounts in Setup, enter Person Accounts in the Quick Find box, and then select Person Accounts.

Person Accounts Setup page

Salesforce CDP Has Been Changed to Customer Data Platform

Salesforce CDP is now called Customer Data Platform. We’re working on updating the name in the UI, documentation, Trailhead, and more.

Deliver to Your Customers with Custom Address Fields

Improve both address data accuracy and your users’ experience with custom address fields. For example, add a “warehouse address” field to a standard or custom object. Users can enter a custom address, or they can use the Google lookup to search for an address. Then you can access each address that’s stored in a custom address field, either as a structured compound data type or as individual address components.

Where: This change applies to Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic in all editions.

Why: Custom address fields are now supported for dynamic forms for Flows. If the end user’s personal language is a fully supported or end-user language in Salesforce, the labels for the components of a custom address now appear in that language. You can add a state in the State and Country picklist with a name and code that match the name and code of an existing state in another country. And the documentation now clarifies expected behavior for address fields around marking fields as required and load times.

How: Custom address fields use the State and Country picklists. By default, all countries, territories, and their states and provinces are visible to users. To specify the available picklist values in Salesforce, configure State and Country/Territory Picklists before you enable custom address fields.

Custom address fields aren’t supported for Lead Conversion, Approval Process, or the address component of Flows. And Salesforce hasn’t validated custom address fields in Community Profile or Data Export.

Filter Your Stream of Change Events

Receive only the change events that you’re interested in instead of all record changes for an entity. Use a filter expression in a channel member, and specify the record and ChangeEventHeader fields and values to filter change events on. Only the matched change events are delivered to your client. With fewer events delivered, you make more efficient use of your event delivery allocation.

Where: This change applies to Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic in Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer editions. If you use Government Cloud and your org was created before January 14, 2022, contact Salesforce to enable this feature. Government Cloud orgs created on or after January 14, 2022, have this feature enabled. This feature is available in all other clouds.

How: With the Customize Application permission, you can configure stream filtering using Tooling API or Metadata API. To create a channel, use PlatformEventChannel. To add a filter expression for a change event, use PlatformEventChannelMember.

For instance, to receive change events only for accounts whose industry is Agriculture and number of employees is over 1,000, specify this filter expression in the PlatformEventChannelMember.FilterExpression field for AccountChangeEvent.

Industry='Agriculture' AND NumberOfEmployees>1000

The fields that you select in the filter expression are automatically added as enriched fields. As a result, change events contain the non-empty selected fields, even when they’re unchanged, and the events can be filtered. In the example filter expression, the Industry and NumberOfEmployees fields are added to the received changed events in the filtered channel if they have a non-empty value.

Note

This feature supports CometD and Pub/Sub API subscribers. It doesn’t support Apex triggers. All field types supported for enriched fields are supported in filter expressions.

This feature was offered in the last release in pilot. In this generally available release, it received several enhancements. 

You can filter on most ChangeEventHeader fields in the filter expression. Array fields in ChangeEventHeader aren’t supported. You can also rename fields without breaking filter expressions with old field names. Field names used in the filter expression will map to the correct fields.

Note

If a filter expression was created before Winter ’23, the renamed fields work only after you update the filter expression and save the channel member again.

If a Salesforce org has a namespace, you can use the namespace prefix in the filter expression. If a filter expression was created before an org had a namespace and the filter expression didn’t contain the namespace prefix in the field names, the filter expression is automatically updated with the namespace prefix and continues to work.

Package your filter expressions in PlatformEventChannelMember. When filter expressions are evaluated, field-level security is ignored. Filter expressions are evaluated on all fields included even if the subscriber doesn’t have access to the fields. Events delivered in the filtered stream include only the fields that the subscriber has access to and exclude the fields the subscriber doesn't have access to. 

When creating filter expressions, note the following. 

  • Fields used in a filter expression are case-insensitive.
  • Text queries in a filter expression are case-insensitive, except for custom fields marked as case-sensitive.
  • When the field is referenced in a filter expression, custom field type changes are blocked meaning that validation is more stringent.

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