Apex Assist

This extension provides advanced tools for supporting Salesforce Apex development. This version is Experimental in that it only supports finding unused methods & fields as an example analysis, the extension will highlight other code problems but only those that might impact this analysis.

Performance & Memory Use

Unlike most other code analysis extensions this one is implemented using just Javascript so there no need to have Java installed to use it. To improve performance a filesystem cache is used to store previously analysed data. The first time you run over a new project the cache will be empty and it may take a few minutes for the analysis to complete, subsequent analysis on the same or similar projects should complete in a few seconds.

The first time analysis can consume quite a lot of memory for large projects. The default maximum heap size for nodejs can be too small for this. You can increase the amount of memory available by setting the NODE_OPTIONS environment variable before starting VSCode:

NODE_OPTIONS = "--max_old_space_size=4096"

QuickStart

• Check your VSCode version is up to date
• Install Apex Assist
• Open a directory in VSCode containing Salesforce package source (MDAPI or SFDX format)
• Run the command 'ApexAssist: Find zombies'

• When the analysis is complete (may take a few minutes) unused methods & fields will have warnings

You can monitor progress of the analysis in the VSCode Output Window, select 'Apex Assist' from the drop down menu.

Multi-Package Analysis

The base analysis code supports full multi-package analysis but only a subset is currently supported by this extension. If you are analysing a project that depends on other packages you should provide a comma separated list of the namespaces in the "extraNamespaces" VS Code settings for 'Apex Assist'. This will suppress errors you will get otherwise because the namespace can not be found. See ApexLink for more information.

FAQ

1. What Apex files are used in the analysis? For directories with a sfdx-project.json file the analysis scans the directories identified by 'packageDirectory'. If there is no sfdx-package.json then all sub-directories are scanned for metadata. For sfdx format projects the .forceignore file directives are honoured.

2. How are namespaces handled? For sfdx projects the namespace is read from sfdx-project.json if available, otherwise it is assumed that the package metadata can be deployed 'unmanged' without an explicit namespace.

3. I get an error for feature/field Y implemented in API XX, why? The analysis contains a description of the platform types and SObjects that is checks against. These could either be a little out of date or I may have missed something. Create an issue at ApexLink.

4. Where is the cache held? It's located in your home directory in '.apexlink_cache'. Each time the cache is used items older than 7 days will be removed but you can clear it at anytime by simply removing it. You can also set the environment variable APEXLINK_CACHE_DIR to provide a custom location.