Salesforce Recently announced the SOQL Builder Visual Studio Code extension. You might be observing lately when you open the workbench Query Editor you will see a red banner asking you to use the latest SOQL Builder. In this blog post we will discuss more on how to use this extension.

Sneak peek: SOQL Builder running in Code Builder. It’s not polished yet, but it’s starting to come together. We’re going to be shipping a preview soon. 😀 #SalesforceDX pic.twitter.com/taaViNLMYV

— Nathan Totten (@ntotten) September 24, 2020

Prerequisites:

1. You need to have Salesforce CLI installed on your machine and configured, In addition to that Visual studio code with Salesforce Extension pack installed and configured properly.
2. Install the SOQL Builder Extension from the market place
3. Create a Empty project using command palette.
4. Authorize the org whose Objects you want to query

Once all the prerequisite are completed you can open the project folder and look for scripts ==> soql ==> accounts.soql ( You can create your own .soql files anywhere in the project folder when you create a empty project salesforce automatically provides accounts.soql and we are going to utilize this file to demonstrate this extention)

Right click on the accounts.soql file and click Open with…

Here you will be shown with two options either to go with normal text builder / SOQL builder. Choose SOQL Builder

Based on the content present inside the accounts.soql file the Query will be formed in SOQL Query section.

Now you can run the query using the button Run Query and you can see the results in the side panel under SOQL Query Results tab.

SOQL Extension at this point provides way to download the query results in two formats one is csv and json formats. Once you click the .csv/.json buttons in SOQL Query Results section individual files will be downloaded under soql ==> query-results as below.

During this preview mode all the basic operations were included in the SOQL Builder like FROM,ORDER BY,SELECT, and LIMIT clauses.

There are lots of limitations in this beta which are covered in the official article here.It is very common for a beta extension to have limitations, Hoping for more featured extension that can replace workbench in the upcoming releases.

Thanks for reading the blog post, Please post your thoughts on this new SOQL Extension.

Saicharan Reddy K Member since November 1, 2018

Loading + Follow Following

Hey there, I am Saicharan working as a Salesforce Support based out of Hyderabad having nearly 5 years of experience in the Information Technology Industry and close to 2 years in Salesforce, Apart from the job I love music and obviously playing cricket. Giving back to the people is what matters most. #Ohana Cheers !!!