Integration-Architect Practice Test Questions

Implement an Enterprise Service Bus for service orchestration, mediation, routing and decouple dependencies across systems.

Explanation:

An ESB provides a hub-and-spoke architecture that decouples Salesforce from every downstream system, centralizing routing, transformation, error handling, and service orchestration in middleware rather than in Apex. This prevents point-to-point @future callouts proliferating in each class, which become hard to manage, hard to monitor, and don’t scale as the number of integrations grows. With an ESB, you can throttle, queue, retry, and monitor each message flow, apply consistent security policies, and reuse shared adapters for protocol translation or data transformation. It also gives you a clear audit trail and SLA enforcement outside of Salesforce, offloading heavy processing from your org. In short, it addresses the CIO’s concerns about viability, governance, and scale much better than embedding future callouts or ETL jobs in Apex.

The platform events are published after the Apex transaction completes.

Explanation:

By default, platform events use the “Publish After Commit” behavior, meaning the event message is only enqueued once the transaction successfully commits. This guarantees subscribers see only committed data and prevents events from firing if the transaction rolls back. If you need subscribers to act on data created in that same transaction (e.g. new records), you must choose “Publish After Commit.” The alternative “Publish Immediately” mode can deliver events before or even if the transaction rolls back, which is not suitable when subscribers rely on committed state. Hence, when you see only publishes happening, you’re observing the post-commit enqueue.

Enterprise Billing System (EBS) - All customer's monthly billing is generated by this system.

Salesforce CRM (CRM)- Customer information, Sales and Support information is maintained in CRM.

Explanation:

Enterprise Billing System (EBS) must be integrated because:
It generates all customer billing, meaning financial data must sync accurately with Salesforce.
Ensures invoices reflect the latest customer updates (e.g., address changes, pricing agreements).
Critical for revenue tracking and compliance.

Salesforce CRM (CRM) is the system of record for customer data, meaning:
All sales, support, and customer profile updates originate here.
Must feed accurate customer data to EBS to prevent billing errors.
Enables customer service agents to view billing history (via integration) without leaving Salesforce.

Why not the Document Management System (DMS)?

While DMS stores bill copies, it’s a downstream system that can be updated via EBS (not a direct integration priority).
Bills are typically generated in EBS first, then archived in DMS—so EBS integration supersedes DMS.

Key Integration Needs:

Bidirectional sync between CRM (customer updates) and EBS (billing records).
Real-time API calls for billing triggers (e.g., contract changes) or batch syncs for large data volumes.
Error handling to reconcile discrepancies across 10M+ records.

This approach ensures billing accuracy while maintaining a single customer view in Salesforce.

Require the Apex REST API Clients to implement the HttpCalloutMock.

Implement HttpCalloutMock to return responses per RAML specification.

Explanation:

Testing HTTP callouts in Apex requires mocking the responses so tests don’t perform real outbound traffic. By having each client class implement the HttpCalloutMock interface, you can define a mock respond() method that returns an HttpResponse built to exactly match your RAML-defined payloads (status code, headers, and JSON/XML body). In your unit tests you use Test.setMock(HttpCalloutMock.class, new YourMock()), ensuring every callout in test context returns a RAML-compliant stub. This guarantees your tests fail if the mock doesn’t conform, effectively validating adherence to the RAML contract.

SAML SSO and just-in-time provisioning

OpenId Connect Authentication Provider and just-in-time provisioning

Explanation:

To give new users instant Community access at first login, you must enable JIT provisioning so SAML or OIDC assertions automatically create the user account, contact, and profile in Salesforce. For a SAML provider, enable “Publish After Commit” JIT provisioning in Single Sign-On settings so the assertion’s attributes (e.g. Federation ID) drive account creation. For an OpenID Connect provider, configure it as an Auth. Provider in Setup, select the Registration Handler or let Salesforce auto-generate one, and enable JIT so the callback payload spins up the user. Without JIT, you’d need manual or registration-handler logic that still requires a separate registration step.

Salesforce with relevant Marketing and ERP information.

Explanation:

Since sales and service associates must log interactions in Salesforce, it should serve as the primary system of record for customer and prospect master data. Consumers of billing data from ERP and campaign data from Marketing Cloud should surface that information in Salesforce (via middleware or connectors), but not own the golden customer record there. Making Salesforce the authoritative CRM ensures a single, consistent view of customer status, activities, and support history, simplifying adoption, reporting, and process automation across departments. Other systems then become derived or analytical sinks, not the source of truth.

Tooling API

Explanation:

The Salesforce Tooling API provides programmatic access to development metadata and diagnostic data—most notably Apex test results and code coverage metrics—without needing to run tests or deploy metadata via the Metadata API. The ApexCodeCoverage and ApexOrgWideCoverage objects expose coverage percentages and line-by-line results, which your custom Java application can query over REST or SOAP. This lets you fetch up-to-date coverage metrics and display them alongside your other enterprise test results. Neither the standard SOAP API (which doesn’t surface coverage), nor the Metadata API (which is for metadata deployment), nor the Analytics API (which surfaces reports and dashboards) expose these granular development artifacts. Only the Tooling API is designed for IDE and dev-ops integrations around tests and coverage.

Store unique identifiers in an External ID field in Salesforce and use this to update the proper records across systems.

Use Change Data Capture to update downstream systems accordingly when a record changes.

Explanation:

A robust bi-directional integration strategy needs two components. First, an External ID field on each Salesforce object holds the corresponding record’s key from each external system. By marking that field as External ID, you can upsert by that value in both directions and ensure you target the correct record in each system . Second, Change Data Capture (CDC) events fire whenever records are created, updated, deleted, or undeleted in Salesforce. Subscribers—your middleware or downstream systems—can consume these events in near real time and push the changes back to the originating system. This combination guarantees accurate routing of updates and keeps all systems in sync without polling or batch jobs.

A Connected App for each external system integration.

Explanation:

Creating individual Connected Apps for each external system best meets both security and auditing requirements. This approach: 1) Enables the principle of least privilege by allowing separate permission sets for each integration, 2) Provides clear audit trails by distinguishing activities from different systems, and 3) Allows revocation of access per system if needed. Option A (shared integration user) violates least privilege and obscures audit trails. Option B (shared Connected App) similarly prevents distinguishing between systems. Option C (unique users) works but is less maintainable than OAuth-based Connected Apps. Salesforce security best practices recommend Connected Apps for system integrations because they: 1) Use OAuth for secure authentication, 2) Support IP restrictions and other security policies, and 3) Generate distinct audit entries in setup audit trails. Each Connected App can be configured with only the necessary API access scopes, implementing least privilege. The audit logs will clearly show which external system performed each action, fulfilling both security requirements while maintaining system accountability.

Provide true message queueing for integration scenarios (including
orchestration,process choreography, quality of service, etc.) given that a middleware solution is required.

Event handling processes such as writing to a log, sending an error or recovery process, or sending an extra message, can be assumed to be handled by middleware.

Event handling in a publish/subscribe scenario, the middleware can be used to route requests or messages to active data-event subscribers from active data event publishers.

Explanation:

For complex integration requirements like caching, queuing, and error handling, middleware solutions are essential. Option B correctly identifies middleware's role in message queuing and orchestration - capabilities beyond Salesforce's native features. Option D acknowledges middleware's strength in comprehensive event handling like logging and error recovery, which would be cumbersome to build in Salesforce. Option E highlights middleware's publish/subscribe routing capabilities, crucial for decoupled architectures. Option A is incorrect because transforming to request-reply doesn't inherently improve performance and isn't always appropriate. Option C wrongly suggests protocol translation within Salesforce; middleware is actually better suited for this. Enterprise integration patterns demonstrate that middleware excels at: 1) Advanced queuing (guaranteed delivery, retries), 2) Complex event processing (filtering, routing), and 3) Cross-system monitoring. Salesforce's native capabilities focus on application-specific functionality, while middleware handles cross-cutting integration concerns. This separation of concerns aligns with the integration architect's role in designing solutions that leverage each platform's strengths while meeting enterprise requirements for reliability and observability.