Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II Exam Guide

About the Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II Exam
Audience Description: Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II
Purpose of This Exam Guide
About the Exam
Exam Outline
Recommended Training and Resources
Salesforce Certification Candidate Code of Conduct
Maintaining Your Salesforce Certification

About the Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II Exam

The Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II Exam is designed for individuals who would like to demonstrate their skills and knowledge in advanced programmatic capabilities of the Lightning Platform and data modeling to develop complex business logic and interfaces. The candidate can design, develop, test, and deploy programmatic solutions that are maintainable, reusable, and follow design patterns and object-oriented programming best practices.

The Salesforce Certified Platform Developer certification is a prerequisite for this certification.

Audience Description: Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II

The Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II Exam is intended for an individual who has experience developing custom applications on the Lightning Platform, including practical application of the skills and concepts noted in the exam objectives below.

The Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II candidate generally has 2-4 years of experience as a developer, including at least 1 year of design, implementation, and deployment experience on the Lightning Platform.

The Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II candidate has the experience, skills, and knowledge outlined below.

Understands the principles and best practices of Salesforce data modeling, user experience design, code development, and testing, and can apply these principles in real-world development environments
Is capable of defining appropriate solutions to meet specific business challenges/process requirements to extend/customize the platform by applying knowledge of declarative and programmatic features of the Lightning Platform
Is competent in developing Apex code that will scale to large data sets and has a good understanding of platform behaviors, limits, and performance considerations
Understands implications when handling larger volumes of data (approximately 300,000 to 480,000 records)
Can build or modify custom user interfaces to display and interact with Salesforce data using Lightning web components and Aura components, advanced Visualforce, CSS, and JavaScript
Is competent in tuning Visualforce pages and understands performance implications of the controller design
Understands and applies best practices for general web and Salesforce-specific security concerns
Can design and implement complex sharing models using declarative and programmatic methods
Can design and implement a test plan that ensures sufficient quality (for example; code coverage, application behaviors, scalability, environment independence, security) across application components
Can test Lightning web components using Jest
Can deploy custom applications, has a broad understanding of the Salesforce development lifecycle, understands deployment tools, and knows when to apply each tool
Understands and can implement Apex SOAP and REST web services, and how to call out from Apex using SOAP and REST
Understands and uses asynchronous programming - queueable, batchable, schedulable, @future, etc.
Understands and applies appropriate techniques for error and exception handling in various programmatic contexts
Implements best practices for trigger development and design patterns, other business logic development, and re-use
Knows how to surface Lightning web components and Aura components on a Lightning page, Visualforce page, and with Quick Actions

Purpose of This Exam Guide

This exam guide is designed to help you prepare for the Salesforce Platform Developer II Exam. This guide provides information about the target audience, the recommended training and documentation, and a complete list of exam objectives. Salesforce highly recommends a combination of on-the-job experience and self-study to maximize your chances of passing the exam.

About the Exam

Here are details about the Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II Exam.

Content: 60 multiple-choice questions and up to five unscored questions
Time allotted to complete the exam: 120 minutes
Passing score: 70%
Version: Exam questions align to the Winter '24 release
Registration fee: US$200, JPY¥30,000, plus applicable taxes as required per local law
Retake fee: US$100, JPY¥30,000, plus applicable taxes as required per local law
Delivery options: Proctored exam delivered onsite at a testing center or in an online environment; find more information on scheduling an exam here.
References: No hard-copy or online materials may be referenced during the exam.
Prerequisite: Salesforce Certified Platform Developer Certification

This exam may contain up to five additional unscored questions to gather performance data. Unscored questions are randomly integrated and have no impact on your final exam result.

Exam Outline

The Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II Exam measures a candidate’s knowledge and skills related to the following objectives. A candidate should have hands-on experience developing custom applications on the Lightning Platform and have demonstrated the application of each of the features/functions below.

Given a scenario, identify the considerations of interactions between multiple processes, both declarative and programmatic.
Given a scenario, propose and justify the optimal programmatic or declarative solution.
Demonstrate knowledge of the best practices for writing Apex triggers.
Describe the Apex features available for error handling and maintaining transactional integrity.
Demonstrate how and where to use advanced keywords in a SOQL query structure.
Analyze a set of requirements and determine the benefits of using asynchronous Apex coding.
Given a scenario and requirements, identify the appropriate dynamic Apex feature to use in the solution.
Given a scenario, identify the appropriate publish / subscribe logic for platform events.
Given a scenario, apply programmatic integration techniques and platform features for inbound and outbound communication.

Given requirements and code snippets for a Lightning web component or Aura component and its Apex controller class, analyze and determine necessary changes to the Apex class.
Identify the techniques for using Visualforce to perform actions, partial page refreshes, and asynchronous operations.
Given a scenario, identify best practices for displaying errors in the user interface.
Given a set of requirements, select the appropriate Lightning web component, Aura component, or Visualforce solution and describe its benefits.
Given a scenario, describe the aspects of Lightning web components or Aura components that can be used to cause elements in a component's markup to display in a responsive manner based on a device's form factor.
Given a scenario, implement the correct method to communicate events through Lightning web components or Aura components.
Describe the purpose and benefit of static resources in Visualforce, Lightning web components, and Aura components.

Apply advanced techniques and tools for testing Apex classes and triggers, such as mocks and stubs.
Apply techniques and tools for testing and debugging Lightning web components, Aura components, and Visualforce controllers, Visualforce controller extensions, and JavaScript.
Given a scenario, Apex code, Apex trigger, or Apex test that is not executing as expected, apply techniques and tools to isolate and identify the root cause.
Given a scenario, formulate the deployment process, supporting tools, and mechanisms for source-driven development.

Identify the common performance issues for user interfaces and demonstrate knowledge of techniques and tools to mitigate them.
Given a scenario, choose the appropriate logic and query structure to maximize application performance and handle large data volumes.
Analyze a given scenario and determine performance improvements that can be achieved with an asynchronous callout.
Select scenarios where code reuse is applicable and how the reuse should be implemented.
Given sample code, identify inefficiencies and demonstrate the ability to resolve them.

Recommended Training and Resources

As preparation for this exam, we recommend a combination of hands-on experience, training course completion, Trailhead Trails, and self-study in the areas listed in the Exam Outline section of this exam guide.

The self-study materials recommended for this exam include:

Trailmix: Prepare for Your Salesforce Platform Developer II Certification
Superbadge: Apex Callouts Superbadge Unit
Superbadge: Platform API Superbadge Unit
Superbadge: Apex Specialist

Salesforce recommends the following additional resources to guide your study.

To review online documentation, tip sheets, and user guides, search for the topics listed in the Exam Outline section of this guide on Salesforce Help and study the information related to those topics.

Salesforce Certification Candidate Code of Conduct

At Salesforce, Trust is our #1 value. Protecting the security of Salesforce Certifications is up to all of us. As a participant in the Salesforce Certification Program, you’re required to review and accept the terms of the Salesforce Certification Program Agreement and Code of Conduct at the beginning of each exam.

Maintaining Your Salesforce Certification

One of the benefits of holding a Salesforce Certification is always being up to date on new product releases. You'll be required to complete the Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II certification maintenance badge on Trailhead once a year.

Don’t let your hard-earned certification expire! If you don't complete all maintenance requirements by the due date, your certification will expire.

Bookmark these useful resources for maintaining your certifications.

Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II Exam Guide

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