New Schema Builder In Winter 2012 Release of Salesforce

Salesforce has been updating its sandbox servers to the new Winter ‘12 release, bringing with it some new developer features including one I’ve been waiting for a long time, a Schema Builder.

Creating objects and building a database schema in Salesforce is extremely easy, however seeing a model of that schema and viewing relationships etc., has always been painful as there was never a visual representation of the data model. 

In its current state, the Schema Builder is fairly light on features. It allows you to view a visual representation of your org’s data model as well as view relationships. You can choose which objects you wish to show and move them around, but that’s really about all you can do at this point.

While it’s nice to have a visual data representation, there are some features I would like to have seen included. One would be the ability to export the model. Often times, we need to create documentation for clients that includes an object model. This would have been a very easy way to do that, export images or PDFs, perhaps. It would also have been nice to be able to hide and show fields on the objects. Some objects have a lot of fields which don’t need to be visible. Instead, let us choose to show just foreign keys or just certain fields that we would like.

Aside from the missing features, I’ve noticed one other large problem. When you have an org with a lot of objects and columns, the Schema Builder doesn’t work. Instead, you get an error informing you the request has exceeded its maximum allowed time limit. I hope they can get this fixed, as these large orgs are where I would find this tool to be the most helpful.

The Schema Builder is still in beta, so there’s no doubt they are working on issues prior to making it generally available. Hopefully some of the issues I’ve found will be addressed in future releases. Issues aside, I have to say I’m excited for the Schema Builder as it’s something I think developers will find very useful going forward. If you have a sandbox that has been upgraded to the Winter ‘12 release and want to view the Schema Builder, login and go to Settings > Schema Builder. To read more on the Winter ‘12 release, head over to Developerforce.