Using SFDX and PMD for Salesforce Code Analysis

When it comes to maintaining a healthy Salesforce ecosystem, understanding your codebase is key. It’s not just about knowing what code you have, but also about ensuring it adheres to best practices and doesn’t harbor any potential security risks. This article focuses on how you can use Salesforce CLI (SFDX), in conjunction with the PMD code scanner, to carry out comprehensive code analysis on your Salesforce platform.

Introduction to SFDX and Code Analysis

SFDX, or Salesforce DX, is a powerful suite of tools designed to increase productivity for developers and simplify team collaboration. The tool brings a modern developer experience to the Salesforce platform, aligning with practices used in many other programming languages.

Code analysis, on the other hand, is a method of checking your code for potential errors, bugs, and security vulnerabilities. By running a code analysis, you can ensure your code is clean, safe, and efficient, all of which contribute to the overall health and performance of your Salesforce ecosystem.

Importance of Code Analysis in Salesforce

Regular code analysis is vital for several reasons:

• It helps identify potential security threats that could be exploited by malicious parties, safeguarding your data and operations.
• It enables you to enforce coding standards and best practices across your team, ensuring code consistency and readability.
• It helps to discover code smells or inefficient parts of your code that can be refactored for improved performance.

PMD Code Scanner and Salesforce

PMD is an open-source static code analyzer that can detect potential problems like dead code, empty blocks, unnecessary object creation, and so forth. When integrated with SFDX, PMD becomes a formidable tool for checking Apex and Visualforce code for best practice adherence, design efficiency, and potential security vulnerabilities.

To get started, we need to ensure that Salesforce CLI (SFDX) is installed and authenticated with our org. This allows us to pull down all the source code that we want to analyze. We also need to check and install necessary plugins, such as @salesforce/sfdx-scanner, which includes the PMD scanner.

Once the setup is complete, we can pull down all the source code from our Salesforce org with this simple command:

!sfdx shane mdapi pull -u myorg -c

Running Code Analysis

With our codebase in place, we can now proceed with running code analysis. This is achieved using the scanner:run command from the @salesforce/sfdx-scanner plugin, like so:

!sfdx scanner:run --format=csv --outfile=CodeAnalyzerGeneral.csv --target="./" --category="Security"

This command will scan the source code in the current directory for security-related issues. The results will be outputted to a CSV file (CodeAnalyzerGeneral.csv).

It’s also possible to run a data flow analysis (DFA) scan, which will examine how data is used and modified as it flows through your code. This can be achieved with the scanner:run:dfa command:

!sfdx scanner:run:dfa --format=csv --outfile=CodeAnalyzerDFA.csv --target="./" --projectdir="./" --category="Security"

This DFA scan will output its results to a different CSV file (CodeAnalyzerDFA.csv), allowing you to review and compare the outcomes of both scan types.

Concluding Thoughts

Implementing regular code analysis in your Salesforce org is a strong step towards maintaining a robust, secure, and efficient platform. The combination of Salesforce CLI (SFDX) and PMD makes this task straightforward and manageable. By regularly analyzing your codebase, you’re not only improving the security of your platform but also enhancing its performance and maintainability.

For a hands-on experience, try out the solution in this Colab notebook. Experiment with the code, run scans, and see how these tools can bring value to your Salesforce development process.