New Trailhead Maintenance Modules!!

One of our last meetups with the Sevilla Salesforce Developer Group was planned so we could start checking the new Trailhead Maintenance exams. We were quite excited about this new approach to maintenance exams and check its flexibility.

That was back in early May 2018 and we had been really early birds, as the maintenance exams weren't ready as modules in Trailhead back then... I've been waiting for this quite a while now, and I've been able to try it for my Platform App Builder and my Platform Developer I certifications.

I have to say that the merge process between the Kryterion account and the Trailhead one is very intuitive and slick! Well done Trailhead team! No fuss, just email validation and merge is done!

So it's all ready now to go for it!

This is the beautiful celebration message you get when you pass your Platform Developer I Certification Maintenance module.

It's a really well structured module, supposed to take 15 minutes to complete, with explanations about some of the new features in Summer '18, like the following:
- new Lightning Styles for Visualforce pages
- new Lightning URL formats
- the UITheme methods to find out the environment in which the user is accessing Salesforce
- the new methods to retrieve the Record Type infos

No, I found more problems with the Platform App Builder Certification Maintenance modules...
I have to say that I find it really helpful that you have to actually do a flow to pass it, as it makes sure you do get to use the new features, so that's a really good way of learning and making sure we all understand the changes.
Maybe my problems are related to the fact that I'm more developer oriented than App Builder oriented, but I think other issues I found were related to the requirements in the challenge being quite open to interpretation...

However, it's really good that Trailhead is asking us to create the flow. It's been a very long time since I created or played with my last Flow... The estimated time to complete this is 30 minutes, and I have to say it took me way longer, as I was getting an error message that wasn't very helpful...

My flow was working, and I tested it before running the check, but I was getting this error message again and again; the reason why I was getting this message was that I was using a Text variable to hold the message String, and I solved this by hard-coding it to the Display message in my Screen element. This was the most annoying thing, as the message returned by the checking utility wasn't very helpful...

My recommendations when you do your maintenance:
- strictly follow the naming conventions indicated in the requirements list
- do not over-engineer your solution, just do what you're asked
- do not create lots of variables, you can use hard-coded values within your message elements

And finally, if you get error messages, be creative and find multiple ways of doing the same thing! I think that's a really good way of training your brain!