Salesforce is a popular cloud based customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Its usefulness is extended in part due to providing subscribers the options to build and manage their environment. With minimal setup and configuration, a business can begin using Salesforce with little customization, or extend its capabilities extensively. Salesforce’s data visualization techniques, however, are outdated and lacks features of common graphing libraries like exporting, drill-down and interactivity. This project produced a build, client and server stack compatible with Salesforce development. The result of the project is a compiled file inside a distributable Salesforce managed package. The build stack is comprised of Webpack, Node.JS and JSForce that builds and zips a single file, and then uploads to Salesforce. The client stack utilizes React and Redux to manage the presentation and application state, and FusionCharts to control the chart and graph rendering. To communicate with the client, Salesforce REST API services are used to extract data from the database. A basic usability study was conducted to assess the application. The feedback shows the application is generally useful, easy to learn and, with a few additional features, would be a viable replacement of Salesforce’s native dashboard. One feature, in particular, which was mentioned several times by the study participants is the ability to customize the data feeding the graphs either by a data source other than Salesforce or custom data.

Recommended Citation: Cook M., Kline D., Pence T., Janicki T., (2017). Extending Data Visualization in Salesforce with React and Redux. UNCW MS CSIS Proceedings. V. 11 , N. 4 .