Pass the Salesforce Integration Architecture Designer Integration-Architect Questions and answers with Dumpstech

The CIO's concern regarding "viability" and "scaling" is rooted in the risks associated with tightly coupled, point-to-point integrations. Using @future methods for direct callouts creates a "spaghetti" architecture where Salesforce must manage the specific endpoints, authentication, and error logic for every external system.

The architect should recommend implementing an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). An ESB acts as a centralized middleware layer that provides mediation, routing, and orchestration. By moving the integration logic to an ESB, Salesforce only needs to send a single message to the bus. The ESB then takes responsibility for delivering that data to multiple business units and external systems. This decouples Salesforce from the downstream systems; if a target system changes its API or is replaced, only the ESB configuration needs to be updated, not the Salesforce Apex code.

While External Services (Option A) provide a low-code way to call APIs, they still represent point-to-point connections and do not solve the broader orchestration and scaling challenges. ETL tools (Option C) are designed for bulk data movement and would not satisfy the need for the near real-time updates that the existing callout logic likely supports. An ESB provides the "quality of service" features—such as guaranteed delivery, retries, and protocol transformation—that are necessary for a growing enterprise to maintain a stable and scalable integration landscape.

With a volume of 2 million records per day, this integration exceeds the practical limits of standard near-real-time patterns like Outbound Messaging or synchronous Apex Callouts. Sending 2 million individual REST requests would likely exhaust the daily API limit and could cause significant performance degradation in Salesforce due to transaction overhead.

An Integration Architect must recommend an Asynchronous Batch Data Synchronization pattern, typically facilitated by a third-party ETL/Middleware tool (e.g., MuleSoft, Informatica, or Boomi). Staging the records off-platform is essential for several reasons:

Throttling: The homegrown system behind a firewall may not be able to handle a massive, sudden burst of 2 million records. A middleware tool can ingest the data from Salesforce and "drip-feed" it into the target system at an acceptable rate.

Error Handling and Retries: Middleware provides sophisticated persistence and "Dead Letter Queues" to ensure that if the homegrown system goes offline, no data is lost.

API Efficiency: The middleware can use the Salesforce Bulk API 2.0 to extract the data in large chunks, which is significantly more efficient than individual REST calls and consumes far fewer API limits.

Option A is a valid concern but is a symptom of the wrong choice of tool (REST). Option B describes an inbound integration to Salesforce, whereas the requirement is outbound. By utilizing a third-party tool to stage and manage the 2 million record flow, the architect ensures that the integration is scalable, respects the corporate firewall constraints (via a secure agent or VPN), and maintains the performance of the Salesforce production environment.

To satisfy a requirement for a synchronous callout triggered by a user action, the architect should use a UI-driven approach, such as a Lightning component and a button.

In Salesforce, triggers (Option B) are primarily used for asynchronous logic in integration contexts. Because a trigger executes as part of the database save operation, making a synchronous callout directly from a trigger is prohibited as it would block the database transaction until the external system responds, leading to performance degradation and "uncommitted work pending" errors. If a trigger must initiate an integration, it must do so asynchronously (using @future or Queueable Apex), which violates the requirement for a synchronous call.

By using a Lightning component, the architect can initiate a synchronous Request-and-Reply pattern. When the sales rep clicks the "7Submit to OMS" button, the componen8t invokes an Apex method that makes the REST callout to the OMS in real-time. The user remains on the page while the system waits for the OMS to respond, allowing for immediate feedback—such as an order confirmation number or an error message—to be displayed in the UI. A Batch Apex job (Option C) is inherently asynchronous and delayed, making it unsuitable for a synchronous, real-time fulfillment requirement.

When integrating Salesforce with high-security enterprise systems like an Enterprise Billing System (EBS) and a Document Management System (DMS), the primary architectural concern is respecting the Enterprise security needs for access control. These systems often contain highly sensitive financial data and are governed by strict regulatory requirements (e.g., PCI-DSS or GDPR).

The integration consultant must evaluate how to extend existing enterprise identity and authorization policies to Salesforce users. This often involves a Identity Federation strategy using protocols like SAML 2.0 or OpenID Connect. Instead of maintaining separate credentials in Salesforce (which Option A suggests and is generally an "anti-pattern" for 10 million records), the consultant should consider using a central Identity Provider (IdP).

By considering enterprise security needs, the architect ensures that when a support agent clicks a link in Salesforce to view a bill, the request is authenticated against the enterprise's security gateway. This allows for Single Sign-On (SSO) while ensuring that authorization (who can see what) remains mastered in the source systems or the central IdP. Migration (Option C) is physically and technically unfeasible for systems handling 10 million customers' historical bills and real-time processing. The focused objective is to build a "window" into these systems from Salesforce while maintaining the integrity of the enterprise's existing security perimeter.

To satisfy the requirement of encrypting standard fields while maintaining their functionality within record-triggered flows, Shield Platform Encryption is the recommended architectural solution.1

Shield Platform Encryption is a modern security layer that allows for encryption at rest while 2preserving critical platform features. Unlike Classic Encryption (Option B)—which is limited to a specific "Encrypted Text" custom field type and often breaks platform features like search and automation—Shield is designed to work with standard fields such as Name, Email, and Phone.

Key architectural considerations for Shield include:

Compatibility with Automation: Shield fields can be used in Flows, Apex triggers, and validation rules. This allows NTO to implement the required record-triggered business logic without needing to decrypt the data manually in code.

Search and Filtering: By using Deterministic Encryption, Shield allows users to filter and search for records based on encrypted fields, which is often a requirement for "widely-used" standard fields.

Compliance and Governance: Shield provides advanced key management (Bring Your Own Key - BYOK) and auditing, ensuring that NTO meets corporate security guidelines while data is being processed by the platform.

Data Masking (Option C) is primarily used for sandboxes to obfuscate PII during testing and is not a production encryption-at-rest solution. By recommending Shield, the architect provides a transparent security model that protects sensitive data without sacrificing the declarative power of Flow Builder.

Effective operational monitoring focuses on the end-user experience and business outcomes rather than just raw technical metrics. An Integration consultant should identify critical business processes (e.g., "Lead Conversion" or "Order Processing") and establish benchmarks to detect performance degradation.

Monitoring purely technical limits (Option A) or individual API events (Option C) provides "noise" without context. For example, if API usage is high but the system is responding quickly, there is no degradation. However, if a critical process that normally takes 2 seconds starts taking 10 seconds, that is a clear indicator of a performance issue that impacts the business.32

The consultant should use tools like Salesforce Event Monitoring or external APM (Application Performance Management) tools to track the execution time of these key transactions. By setting alerts when performance deviates from established benchmarks, Operations can be proactively notified before users begin to lose productivity or abandon the system. This holistic approach ensures that monitoring is aligned with business value and provides actionable insights for troubleshooting bottlenecks in code, automation, or integrations.

The timing of Platform Event publishing is a critical detail for an Integration Architect, as it affects data consistency and transaction integrity. In Salesforce, the default and most common behavior for publishing Platform Events from Apex is "Publish After Commit."

When an architect chooses the "Publish After Commit" setting (defined at the event level), the events are held in a buffer and are only released to the event bus after the Apex transaction completes successfully. This ensures that if the database transaction fails and rolls back, the event—which might trigger external actions—is never sent. This prevents "ghost" events where an external system is told to process data that was never actually saved to the Salesforce database.

The question implies a standard scenario where events are being "published" into the bus. In this state, the events have passed the transaction boundary. If the events were only "being published from Apex" (Option C), it doesn't describe the state of the delivery or the transaction. Option B is technically incorrect for standard event publishing logic, as Salesforce explicitly separates the event bus from the database commit to maintain atomicity.

Understanding this "After Commit" behavior is vital when designing synchronization patterns. If the architect requires the event to be sent regardless of whether the transaction succeeds (e.g., for logging a failure), they would need to configure the event as "Publish Immediately." However, in a standard synchronization use case where events are "only being published," it signifies that the source transaction has finalized, and the messages are now available for subscribers (like middleware or other Salesforce orgs) to consume.

---

When a target system experiences prolonged outages (lasting "several days"), point-to-point integrations built directly within Salesforce are prone to failure because they lack the persistence required for long-term retries. The architecturally sound recommendation is to utilize middleware queuing and buffering to "insulate" Salesforce from the target system's instability.

In this architecture, Salesforce sends the order to a middleware layer (such as an ESB or iPaaS). The middleware immediately acknowledges receipt of the message, freeing up Salesforce resources. If the manufacturing system is offline, the middleware stores the order in a persistent Message Queue. Unlike Salesforce Outbound Messaging (Option B), which only retries for up to 24 hours, enterprise middleware can be configured to hold messages for days or even weeks.

Middleware also provides sophisticated Quality of Service (QoS) features, such as "Dead Letter Queues" for manual intervention and customized retry schedules (e.g., retrying every hour instead of every few minutes). This decoupling ensures that Salesforce users can continue to create and "send" orders without seeing technical errors, even while the backend manufacturing system is down. Once the manufacturing service is restored, the middleware "drains" the queue, delivering all buffered orders in the correct sequence. This strategy provides the highest level of reliability and resilience for mission-critical business processes.

When designing high-volume integrations, the Salesforce Platform Integration Architect must distinguish between standard REST resources and "Composite" resources to optimize API consumption. The Salesforce REST API provides several composite resources to group multiple operations into a single call, thereby reducing the overhead of multiple HTTP requests and helping to stay within daily API limits.

According to Salesforce documentation on Composite Resources, the sObject Tree resource (/services/data/vXX.X/composite/tree/) is specifically designed to handle multiple records in a single request. While it is primarily marketed for creating complex hierarchies (parent-child relationships), it has a unique limit that allows for up to 200 records to be processed in a single call. These records can even be unrelated records of the same type. This is a significant advantage over the standard Batch and Composite resources.

The Composite resource and the Batch resource both have a much lower limit of 25 subrequests per call. While each subrequest in a Batch call could technically be a collection operation, the question specifically asks for the resource that natively supports the "200 records" threshold preferred for bulk-style updates within the REST framework. By utilizing the sObject Tree resource, the architect can bundle 200 record updates into a single transaction, effectively reducing API consumption by a factor of 200 compared to individual REST calls. This aligns with the requirement to avoid major architectural changes (like switching to the Bulk API 2.0) while solving the immediate problem of exceeding daily governor limits. In the context of the Integration Architect exam, understanding these specific payload limits is crucial for selecting the most efficient "Request-Reply" or "Data Synchronization" pattern.

To provide "instant access" and a seamless experience for Community (Experience Cloud) users, the architect must choose an authentication and provisioning strategy that handles user creation on-the-fly. While both SAML and OpenID Connect (OIDC) are viable for SSO, OpenID Connect is the modern standard for consumer-facing "Social" or external identity integrations because it is built on OAuth 2.0.

The critical component for "self-service" is the Registration Handler. When an OpenID Connect Authentication Provider is configured in Salesforce, you must associate it with an Apex class that implements the Auth.RegistrationHandler interface. This handler is executed during the SSO flow if the user does not already exist. It provides the architect with full programmatic control to:

Match the incoming identity to an existing Contact or Account.

Create a new Contact record if one doesn't exist.

Provision a new User record with the correct Profile, Permission Sets, and Locale settings.

Link the User to the correct Account hierarchy, which is vital for Community security models.

Option A suggests Just-in-Time (JIT) provisioning, which is a declarative way to create users. However, JIT is often too rigid for Experience Cloud requirements, as it has limited ability to perform complex data lookups or handle the specific linking of Contacts to Accounts required for external users. Option C is technically mismatched in common Salesforce terminology; while SAML uses JIT, the Registration Handler is the native, specific mechanism designed to work with Authentication Providers (like OIDC). By using B, the company ensures that a subscriber logging in for the first time via the IAM system is instantly and accurately provisioned in Salesforce, eliminating the need for multiple accounts.