How to Enable Intellisense Support for Salesforce Apex Code in Visual Studio Code

 

Introduction 

I am sure we all know how painful it can be to write code without Intellisense support for the code editor. Therefore, it is really important to see how we can add this feature to our favorite code editor, Visual Studio Code.

In this blog, we will look into how to enable Intellisense support for Salesforce metadata. Enabling this feature will increase code writing capability and accuracy exponentially for developers.

Salesforce provides IntelliSense support by implementing “Apex Language Server” through Salesforce CLI. “Apex Language Server” is dependent on Java as its prerequisite.

Let’s start by downloading and installing the Java Runtime Engine which we can download from the Java Development Kit.

Download Java Development Kit

Step 1

Download the JDK version, as shown below:

Step 2

Once the download is complete, we can install JDK using Administrator privileges:

Step 3

Click Next

Step 4

Keep defaults and click Next.

Step 5

Wait until the installation files are copied.

 

Step 6

Keep defaults and click Next.

Step 7

Wait until the installation is completed.

Step 8

Click Close to complete the installation.

Configure User Settings in Visual Studio Code

Launch Visual Studio Code and follow the below steps:

Step 1

Use shortcut “Ctrl + Shift + P” to launch the Command Palette

Step 2

Search for “User Settings”

Step 3

Run the command “Preferences: Open User Settings”

Inside the User Settings, follow the below steps.

Step 1

Search for a User Property “Java: Home”

Step 2

Locate the property “Salesforcedx-vscode-apex > Java: Home”

Step 3

Specify the installation path of JRE folder, in my case, it is “/Program Files/Java/jre1.8.0_231”

As soon as we are done with the steps above, we need to follow the below instructions.

Step 1

Click on the output Tab in the terminal window.

Step 2

Select “Apex Language Server” from the Output. If you see a message coming through, that means that “Apex Language Server” is up and running.

Now, the next thing to do is to refresh sObject Definitions from Salesforce Dev Org or Sandbox to the local Definitions cache.

To refresh the sObjects Definition, we need to first close User Settings Window and use the shortcut “Ctrl + Shift + P” to launch the Command Palette.

Then follow the below steps.

Step 1

Search for the “SFDX: Refresh SObject Definitions” command.

Step 2

Click “SFDX: Refresh SObject Definitions”

 

Step 3

Select what type of SObject Definitions you want to refresh. I would recommend selecting “All SObject”, since this will be the most effective option to refresh the definition cache all at once for the complete Salesforce Org

Step 4

After you make the selection, look for the Output window in the terminal where we can see this Refresh Process has started successfully, as shown below.

Step 5

After a short wait, you can look for the Output window again. If everything goes as expected, you will see the process has completed successfully, with exit code 0. Exit Code 0 means that no errors have been encountered. If it encountered an error, the respective error code would have been returned.

That is all for the configuration. Now it is time to test if Intellisense is enabled as expected.

Let's create an Apex test code to see if we get Intellisense support. Here I have added a trigger, as shown below.

We can see that Intellisense support is available.

Happy Coding.

Hope you enjoyed this article. Please leave your comments below to let me know how you like the content and how you find it helpful for learning the topic.