Feature Management has become GA in Winter’18 and with it the ability to have finer control and visibility over how users of your package consume its functionality. It provides an Apex API and corresponding objects in your License Management Org (LMO). With these objects, you can switch features on and off or even extend the capacity or duration of existing ones. For features that you simply want to monitor adoption on you can also track adoption and send metrics back to your LMO as well. This is all done within the platform, no HTTP callouts are required.

This blog focuses on a tracking and metrics use case and presents a Lightning Component to allow users to activate a given feature and after that contribute to an aggregated scoring of that feature sent back to you the package owner!

Consider this scenario. The latest Widgets App package has added a new feature to its Widgets Overview tab. The ability to analyze widgets! Using Feature Management they can now track who activates this feature and ratings their customers give it.

Trying it Out: You can find the full source code for this sample app and component here. You can also easily give it a try via the handy Deploy to SFDX button! Do not worry though, it will not write back to your production org, it’s totally isolated in this mode. Unless you choose to package it up and associate your LMA etc.

Your customers may not want every user to have the ability to activate and deactivate features as shown above. The sample application associated with this blog includes a Manage Featurescustom permission that controls this ability. Users without this custom permission assigned only see the feedback portion of the component. If the feature has not been activated a message is displayed informing the user to consult with their admin.

The component only sends the average score per feature per customer back to you. However, a user’s individual score is captured in the subscriber org via custom objects. Enabling you to pick up the phone and dig a bit deeper together with customers showing particularly low or high scores.

The following shows what you get back in your License Management Org LMO (typically your companies production org). By using standard reporting you can easily see what features have been activated, their average score and how many users contributed to the rating.

NOTE: The average score returned to the production org is represented as a value from 1 to 50.

So let’s now dig into the code and the architecture of this solution. Firstly we need some feature parameters, then some corresponding Apex API to read and write to them. You define the parameters via XML under the/featureParameters folder.

NOTE: In this blog, we are dealing with parameter values that flow from your customers org back into your production org, hence the SubscriberToLmo usage. Also keep in mind that per the docs, updates to your LMO may take up to 24 hrs.

You can also create package feature parameters via a new tab on the Package Details page in your packaging org. However, if you are using Scratch Orgs you define them via metadata directly. The Feedback component needs you to define three parameters per feature. To support our scenario, the following parameters are defined. WidgetAnalysis (Boolean), WidgetAnalysisCount (Integer), and WidgetAnalysisScore (Integer).

NOTE: When your code sets parameter values, mixed DML rules apply. So typically you would set these via an async context such as @future or a queueable.

To use the Feedback Component included in the sample code for this blog, you set two attributes, the name of your feature parameter and an attribute that the rest of your component code can use to conditionally display your new feature! The following shows how in the above scenario, the new Widget Analysis component has used c:featureFeedback component to activate the feature, get a user rating and control the display of the new graph to the user.

Take a deeper look at the Feature Feedback Component Apex controller to see the above Feature Management API in action, as well as how it aggregates the scores.

Back over in your License Management Org, the above report was based on one of the four new custom objects provided by a Salesforce package. The Feature Parameter object represents the package parameters defined above. The Feature Parameter Date, Feature Parameter Integer, and Feature Parameter Boolean are the values set via code running in the subscriber org associated with the License record. Per the documentation, it can take up to 24hrs for these to update.

Summary

Knowing more about how your customers consume applications you build on the platform is a big part of customer success and your own. You should also check out the Usage Metrics feature if you have not already.

There is a quite a bit more to Feature Management to explore. Such as controlling feature activation exclusively from your side, useful for pilots or enabling paid features. Of special note is the ability tohide related Custom Objects until features are activated. This is certainly a welcome feature to your customer’s admins when working with large packages since they only see in Object Manager objects relating to activated features.

Finally, I recommend you read the excellent documentation in the ISVForce guide very carefully before going ahead and trying this out in your main package. Since this feature integrates with your live production data. The documentation recommends to try this out in a temporary package first and discuss rollout with your legal team.

P.S. You can also use the FeatureManagement.checkPermission method to check if the user has been assigned a given custom permission without SOQL. Very useful!