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I am trying to represent environment variables in the Salesforce codebase and came across Custom Metadata Types. So based on which Sandbox I am in, I want to vary the baseURL of an external service that I am hitting from my apex class. I want to avoid hard coding anything in the class, and hence trying to find out an environment variable like solution.

How would you represent the URL as a custom metadata type? Also, how can I access it in the class? What happens when a qa sandbox is refreshed from prod? Do they custom metadata type records get overridden?

Rishi Katyal
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How are you calling that external service? If it's truly a base url you might be better of using "named credential" for it. It'll abstract the base url away for you, include authentication or certificate if you have to present any...

Failing that - custom metadata might be a poor choice. They're kind of dictionary objects, you can add more (but not from apex) but if you deploy stuff using Git/Ant/SFDX CLI rather than changesets it'd become bit pain, you'd need different custom metadata value for sandbox vs prod. Kinda defeats the purpose.

You might be better off using custom setting instead (hierarchy is enabled by default, list you'd have to flip a checkbox in setup. List is useful if you need key-value kind of pairs, similar to custom metadata): https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/74049/what-is-the-difference-between-custom-settings-and-custom-metadata-types

And you can modify them with Apex too. Which means that in ideal world you could have a "postcopy" class running as soon as sandbox is refreshed that overwrites the custom setting with the non-prod value. For named credential I don't think you can pull it off, you'd need a mini deployment that changes it or manual step (have you seen https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/q/955/799 ?)

eyescream
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  • Thanks for the response. Well, I'm calling the external service using callouts. so I have a remote site setting defined for it. Also first I went to create `Custom Settings` of List type, but I saw a tip in the UI, that said: "If you are creating List Custom Setting, then go for Custom Metadata Type Instead". And that's how I ended up creating the custom metadata type. Not sure if this is the best choice or not. I am a newbie and still learning. Just wish there was a better way to deal with this. – Rishi Katyal Sep 03 '20 at 14:54
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    How about you make 2 named creds and in code pick one or another's name based on "SELECT IsSandbox FROM Organization"? – eyescream Sep 03 '20 at 18:27