Tip of the Month: April. By Senior Consultant Paul Overy.
The Salesforce Developer Workbench is a very powerful tool for administrators and developers. You can use it to navigate your objects, perform SOQL queries or SOSL Searches. You can import/modify data via a web table, or via an import document. You can even perform REST calls, execute anonymous APEX and much more!
Documentation for the Workbench can be found here: https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Workbench
I will go over a few of the tools, below, but I recommend that you try it in your own organization to see what a powerful and useful tool it is!
To Log in to the Workbench, use this link:
https://workbench.developerforce.com/login.php
Once you are logged in, you will have numerous options that you can navigate to through the top menus, or via the Jump to.
The Standard & Custom Objects option will allow you to choose an object and drill down to the object’s Attributes, Child Relationships, Fields and Record Type Infos:
Metadata Type and Components gives you access to various types of information about your Salesforce instance, including: Assignment Rules, Apex Triggers, Workflow Rules, ListViews, Groups, and much more. You’ll have to click on these to see what they all do. There is a ton of useful information here:
The SOQL Query tool can be extremely useful. It allows you to quickly select some fields and conditions, and perform queries. This can be very helpful to find data, or when developing your DML Queries:
The Data options allow you to Insert, Delete, Update, Upsert, etc. The interface provides a form for working on a single record, or you can select a File for bulk data modifications.
The last piece that I will discuss is the APEX Execute tool, with can be very useful for testing code fragments or even to perform changes to your data (with extreme caution, of course):
I hope this article convinces you to try out the Workbench. It can be a real time (and sometimes a life) saver. Be sure to check out the other features that it has, as well.