Apex is Salesforce’s proprietary programming language, designed to help developers build robust business logic and automate complex processes. Running on Salesforce servers, Apex integrates seamlessly with the platform’s declarative features, enabling advanced customizations such as triggers, batch jobs, and web services. Developers primarily use Apex for two purposes:

1. To create custom functionality that extends Salesforce's out-of-the-box capabilities.
2. To automate complex business processes.

For a team relying on Apex customizations, deploying Apex changes is a crucial part of the Salesforce development lifecycle. It ensures that new functionality, bug fixes, or enhancements are consistently applied across development, testing, and production environments. Teams often rely on tools like SFDX or third-party solutions to streamline the deployment process and reduce risks. These tools can be sufficient to a certain level of complexity, but as teams grow, new challenges arise.

The Challenge of Changing Apex with Multiple Cooks in the Kitchen

As teams grow, adding more "cooks to the kitchen" often leads to increased complexity. Apex files, which define critical logic for Salesforce objects like Accounts or Opportunities, are especially challenging because they are frequently modified simultaneously by multiple team members to address various business needs. Without proper coordination, these simultaneous changes can lead to overwrites, conflicts, and errors.

The Problem with Shared Sandboxes

To manage this, some teams opt for a shared sandbox where everyone collaborates on the same Apex files. While this keeps changes synchronized during development, it creates significant deployment challenges. When one team member wants to deploy their changes, isolating them can be difficult because the shared files may include updates from others that aren’t ready for release.

Alternatives: Git and Private Sandboxes

One solution is using Git for version control, allowing team members to work on branches, track changes, and merge updates carefully. However, many teams find Git intimidating or overly complex, especially when not all team members are familiar with it.

An alternative is assigning each developer a private sandbox. This setup enables independent work on Apex files, allowing team members to test and promote only their specific changes when ready. While this reduces Git dependency, it introduces another challenge: during deployment, ensuring your changes don’t overwrite someone else’s work in the shared org becomes tricky and sometimes nearly impossible.

Discovering you’ve accidentally overwritten someone else’s work can be a frustrating experience. Everything must pause to assess the damage, attempt a rollback (if possible), and restore what was broken. While a single incident might seem manageable, repeated occurrences can lead to:

• Delays: Valuable time is wasted reverting changes, investigating conflicts, and restoring functionality.
• Risk: Broken orgs can lead to long hours of troubleshooting and fixing affected configurations.
• Reduced Collaboration: Developers may avoid working on shared objects to prevent conflicts, slowing down progress and innovation.

Salesforce developers need tools that facilitate collaboration, safeguard parallel changes to Apex files, prevent conflicts and overwrites, and provide precise control over deployments.

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How Salto Simplifies Apex Promotions

Salto offers powerful capabilities to streamline the promotion of Apex changes.

First, Salto supports change-based deployments, enabling teams to compare their org with earlier snapshots, identify changes within a specific time frame, and deploy only what’s needed.

Salto also allows users to cherry-pick only the relevant sections of Apex code and promote only them, without overwriting existing implementations in the target org. If a conflict emerges, Salto will surface it and will offer a simple, no-code UI to resolve it, eliminating the need for Git knowledge.Salto also allows you to explore Apex class dependencies and include them in your deployment with a few clicks.

Lastly, you can test and validate your changes alongside the current version in the target org with minimal effort. Sounds too good to be true? Try it yourself with Salto’s 30-day free trial or review the step by step guide below.

Step-by-Step: Promoting Specific Apex Changes with Salto

Step 1: Create a Change-Based Deployment

Start by selecting your source org and the point in time to compare against. For example, choose the date when you began your changes. In this scenario, I want to deploy a specific update to an Apex class, Account Management, from my DevSeqQA org to SIT.

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Step 2: Identify Changes

Salto will scan the org for changes made since the selected date and organize them into a table, segmented by:

• Change types (additions, modifications, deletions)
• Metadata types
  
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You can click on any element to explore its details. In the example below, a click on the Apex class will reveal that the code changed and that new functions were added. 

Step 3: Detect Required Dependencies

Once an element is selected, Salto scans for missing dependencies. In this case, the new function relies on a field that doesn’t exist in the target org. To resolve it, I can simply include the missing field in my deployment by selecting its checkbox.

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Step 4: Preview Deployment

After all changes have been selected, we’ll click on Preview deployment to see a summary of the deployment package. At this point, Salto will run the changes against the target org and will flag conflicts, if detected. Salto has a built-in, point-and-click conflict resolution flow that allows users to resolve conflicts without having to interact with Git.  

In the deployment preview stage, Salto summarises the changes you’re about to deploy. You can:

• Review the list of changes
• Click on each element to see its content

For example, when reviewing the Account Management class, I can see that another developer added a new function in SIT while I worked in DevSeqQA. Salto ensures my changes are deployed incrementally, so the new function in SIT remains intact.

At this stage, you can also test and validate your changes alongside the current code in the target environment.

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Why Choose Salto for Apex Deployments?

To summarize, Salto helps teams to gain more control of their Apex change management and ensures no one’s work is getting overwritten. With Salto teams can - 

• Promote specific Apex changes without overwriting the values in target
• Identify and include missing dependencies
• Test and validate your changes alongside the current values in target
• Avoid conflicts, errors and overwriting the values in target

By combining precision, visibility, and collaboration, Salto empowers teams to manage Salesforce development efficiently and confidently.

Ready to experience smoother deployments? Start your 30-day free trial with Salto today.