Translate Needs to Integration Requirements22% of the exam
Network, locking, ordering and transaction constraints
Which design each system or process constraint forces: who opens the connection through a firewall, where multi-system transactions and compensation live, idempotent inbound writes, record-lock contention in loads, Change Data Capture ordering, throttled or offline targets, and capability checks on the other system.
Given a use case and business process, evaluate system and process constraints.
~8 min read · 17 practice questions ·
What the exam expects
- Decide which side must open the connection when a firewall blocks inbound traffic, and where WS-Security must be added when Salesforce can't produce it.
- Recognise that Salesforce can't join a distributed transaction, so multi-system rollback, compensation and long-running work move to middleware or callbacks.
- Make inbound writes idempotent and avoid record-lock contention in loads.
- Rebuild Change Data Capture ordering across channels and plan for subscriber outages and throttled targets.
- Check the other system's capabilities before choosing a mechanism (gRPC for Pub/Sub API, OpenAPI for External Services, OData for Salesforce Connect).
Key terms: compensation (undoing already-committed work in other systems after a later step fails); idempotent (repeating a call has no extra effect); transactionKey (CDC header field shared by every change in one transaction).
Key facts
Distributed transactions
- Detail
- Salesforce can't participate; rollback and compensation live in middleware
WS-Security
- Detail
- Not supported natively; inject through a security/XML gateway
Callouts per transaction
- Detail
- 100
Cumulative callout timeout
- Detail
- 120 seconds per transaction
Lock wait
- Detail
- A transaction waits at most 10 seconds for a record lock
Bulk API default
- Detail
- Original Bulk API runs batches in parallel and has Serial mode; Bulk API 2.0 is always parallel
Event retention
- Detail
- 72 hours; no storage guarantee beyond
commitNumber
- Detail
- Diagnostic only; unique only within one database instance
Pub/Sub API transport
- Detail
- gRPC and HTTP/2, Avro payloads
Sources for this section (6)
- Integration Patterns Overviewarchitect.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Execution Governors and Limitsdeveloper.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Unable to lock rowhelp.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Event Message Durabilitydeveloper.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- ChangeEventHeader Fieldsdeveloper.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Get Started with Pub/Sub APIdeveloper.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Why can't Salesforce roll back an ERP order when a later step fails?
- When should a Bulk API load run in Serial mode?
- Which two header fields reconstruct a lead conversion's order?
- Why does a Queueable job that needs 150 callouts chain another job?
The questions are free to read. Answers with their sources and self-grading are included with the pack.
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