SFDCWallah

Salesforce is a cloud-based platform that offers various services and features for businesses, such as customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, analytics, and more.

One of the key aspects of Salesforce is its ability to integrate with other systems and applications, both within and outside the Salesforce ecosystem.

To achieve this, Salesforce provides different ways of exchanging data and events between systems, such as Change Data Capture and Platform Events.

In this blog post, we will compare these two methods and explain how they work with some examples.

Change Data Capture (CDC) is a feature that allows you to capture changes that occur in your Salesforce data and publish them as events to a streaming channel.

These events can then be subscribed by external systems or applications that need to receive updates on the data changes.

For example, if you have a mobile app that displays customer information from Salesforce, you can use CDC to get real-time notifications when the customer data is updated in Salesforce. This way, you can keep your app data in sync with Salesforce data without polling or querying the database.

Platform Events are a type of custom event that you can define and publish in Salesforce to communicate specific business processes or actions to external systems or applications.

Unlike CDC, which captures data changes automatically, Platform Events are triggered by your own logic or code.

You can use Platform Events to send messages or commands to external systems or applications that need to perform some actions based on the events.

For example, if you have a web service that processes orders from Salesforce, you can use Platform Events to send order details and instructions to the web service when an order is created or updated in Salesforce. This way, you can orchestrate complex workflows across systems using events.🚀

Both CDC and Platform Events use the same underlying technology of streaming API, which enables high-volume, low-latency, asynchronous, and reliable messaging between systems. However, there are some differences between them that you should consider when choosing which one to use for your integration scenarios. Here are some of the main differences:

• CDC captures changes in standard and custom objects, while Platform Events capture changes in custom event objects that you define.
• CDC publishes events automatically when data changes occur, while Platform Events publish events manually when you invoke the publish method in Apex or REST API.
• CDC events contain the record ID, change type, change origin, transaction key, entity name, and changed fields of the data change, while Platform Events contain the fields that you define for the custom event object.
• CDC events are ordered and replayable, meaning that you can retrieve past events based on their sequence number or time window, while Platform Events are unordered and non-replayable, meaning that you can only receive the events that are currently in the streaming channel.
• CDC events have a retention period of 24 hours, while Platform Events have a retention period of 72 hours.

As you can see, CDC and Platform Events have different use cases and characteristics that make them suitable for different integration scenarios.

You should evaluate your requirements and choose the one that best fits your needs.

One use case where CDC can be very helpful is when you have a customer service application that needs to access and update customer information from Salesforce.

For example, suppose you have a web-based chatbot that interacts with your customers and provides them with support and guidance.

The chatbot needs to access the customer’s profile, preferences, order history, and other relevant data from Salesforce to provide personalized and accurate responses.

It also needs to update Salesforce with any changes or actions that the customer performs during the chat session, such as updating their contact information, placing an order, or requesting a refund.

With CDC, you can easily achieve this data synchronization between your chatbot and Salesforce.

You can enable CDC for the objects and fields that you want to track in Salesforce, such as Account, Contact, Order, and Case.

Then, you can subscribe to the CDC events from your chatbot application using a streaming API client or a platform event trigger.

Whenever a change occurs in Salesforce, such as a new record is created, an existing record is updated or deleted, or an undelete operation is performed, a CDC event is published with the details of the change.

Your chatbot can receive these events in near real-time and update its own data accordingly.

Similarly, whenever your chatbot makes a change to the customer data, such as creating a new case or updating an order status, it can use the Salesforce REST API or SOAP API to send the change back to Salesforce.

By using CDC, you can ensure that your chatbot and Salesforce are always in sync and have consistent and up-to-date customer data.

This can improve your customer service quality and efficiency, as well as reduce the risk of data loss or corruption.

CDC can also help you reduce the load on your Salesforce org and avoid hitting API limits, as you don’t need to poll for changes frequently or query for large amounts of data.

Platform events are a type of custom object in Salesforce that allow you to publish and subscribe to events in real time.

They are useful for integrating Salesforce with external systems, such as IoT devices, web services, or mobile apps.

Imagine you are a sales manager who wants to monitor the performance of your sales team and get alerts when they close a deal.

You also want to track the location of your sales reps and their activities on the field. How can you achieve this with platform events?

One way is to create a platform event object called Deal_Closed__e that has fields such as Account_Name__c, Amount__c, and Rep_Name__c.

You can then publish this event from your Salesforce org whenever a sales rep closes a deal, using Apex triggers, Process Builder, or Flow Builder.

You can also subscribe to this event from an external system, such as a dashboard app, that can display the deal information and send you notifications.

Another way is to create a platform event object called Rep_Location__e that has fields such as Rep_Name__c, Latitude__c, and Longitude__c.

You can then publish this event from your mobile app whenever a sales rep updates their location, using the Salesforce Mobile SDK or REST API.

You can also subscribe to this event from your Salesforce org, using Apex triggers or Lightning components, that can update the rep’s record with their location and show their activities on a map.

By using platform events, you can achieve real-time data exchange between Salesforce and external systems, without relying on polling or batch processing.

You can also decouple the publishers and subscribers of the events, making your system more scalable and flexible. Platform events are beneficial for use cases that require asynchronous communication, event-driven architecture, or streaming data.