YAAAY!!!! Passed the Platform Developer II – MCQ…

Salesforce Platform Developer II (PDII) Certification made realistic now!!!

You hear it right! Now the Salesforce Platform Developer II exam is made more easy with realistic tasks and flexible deadlines (Actually no deadline, in other words, set your own deadline :P)

Salesforce recently introduced changes in the path for attaining Platform Developer II (PDII) Certification. Earlier, Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II (PDII) certification had two steps. Firstly, we must appear for a proctored multiple-choice question. After successfully passing the first step, the candidate must complete a technical assignment and get it reviewed. The time taken to get Platform Developer II certified was generally around 6+ months.

The New Change:

Effective June 28, 2017, the Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II (PDII) certification will again have two (but simple parts) parts:

• Proctored multiple-choice exam
• 4 Trailhead superbadges. These superbadges replaces the Programming Assignment and thus intended to be useful in gauging candidate’s knowledge on advanced, real-world business requirements covering features, concepts, and scenarios that are essential for a Platform Developer II to know, including Apex programming, data integration and more.

Two of the superbadges, Apex Specialist and Data Integration Specialist, are available today on Trailhead. The remaining two superbadges are currently in development with an ETA before the end of 2017.

Update [31-Jan-2017]:

Hurray! The long wait is over now. 2 other new super badges are out as well. Lightning Component Framework Specialist and Advanced Apex Specialist. You must note that the last Super badge(Advanced Apex Specialist) gets unlocked only when the prior 3 super badges are completed.  So go ahead and blaze all the super badges guys!

 

Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) Pattern:

• 60 multiple-choice/multiple-select questions
• 120 minutes allotted to complete the exam (time allows for unscored questions)
• 63% is the passing score

I don’t want to bore you with the specifics of the exam anymore. Let’s get to the business.

What to prepare for the MCQ part of PD-II (My Study Notes):

Before we jump into topics, Just remember – No need to panic about this exam. It’s just a practical version of what you learnt in Apex Design pattern, Apex programming, and Debugging your code.

And… Ya, I forgot about this – Don’t Ever Forget To Study The Sample Questions Given in Official Study Guide Here. I got all the 5 questions mentioned in the Study guide.

Topics to go through:

• Apex Design pattern
• Visualforce Developer Guide
• Lightning Design System Basics.
• Asynchronous Apex
• Apex Triggers and Order of Execution
• When and how to use @future (callout=true)
  
• Tools for using metadata in salesforce (Whisper word: Workbench)
• Best practices in Unit testing (about getURLU especially)
• Displaying Error messages in Vf pages and in lightning pages
• Sharing model in Salesforce
• Apex code Debugging from the sample code (some examples around: Database.rollback )
• Best practices for Apex CPU time limits
• Have Apex Governor limits on your fingertips
• Custom and Standard controllers
• Using multiple custom controllers and order of execution in the same
• Ways to view state issues
• Debugging triggers
• Exception handling
• SOQL and its best practices (especially preventing SQL injection)
• Types of fields in objects.
• Unique and External ID fields.
• Debugging in Developer Console and its components (refer Salesforce Help Doc here)
• Using SOAP/REST web services and its best practices.
• SOAP API parameters
• REST annotations
• Types of APIs in Salesforce and its basics
• VF pages with Javascript remote actions
• Dynamic SOQL and its limitations
• Visualforce tags (Tip: Not the basic tags)
• List, Set and Map collections in apex
• Workflows and Process builders (Tip: If process builder is an option in Ans, Think twice. Mostly that would be the ans. Don’t blame me if you get it wrong. 😛 )
• Debugging run time errors from sample code. (Tip: there could be multiple bugs in the code. Look for the line which will cause failure at first in the order of execution)
• Know about Debug logs and how to debug via debug logs, and setting the parameters for debug logs.
• Chatter and how apex can access chatter programmatically
• Pagination in Vf pages and best practices

Hope you had an idea on all the areas to cover. In addition, to these go through the Official Study Guide to see the weightage of topics for the exam. Also, I advise to go through the following references to read on the additional study notes:

• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/go-get-platform-developer-ii-mcq-part-1-preparation-ty-vu
• Apex Design Pattern – Video & Tech Library Doc
• Salesforce Apex Guide Doc

Final Tip: Try to eliminate all the wrong answers / unrealistic answers. It will help you boiling down to fewer options to choose.

All The Best! Waiting to hear your success stories! 🙂

Please post your experience/study notes as a blog post so that it can help aspiring developers around the world. Let’s grow helping each other!