The Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II (PDII) exam is designed for experienced Salesforce developers who want to validate advanced technical skills across the full platform stack. This credential demonstrates your ability to design, build, and optimize complex solutions using Apex, Lightning, and Salesforce APIs. Whether you're preparing for your first attempt or refining your knowledge, this page provides a clear roadmap of exam topics, question formats, and proven study strategies to help you succeed.
Use this topic map to guide your study for Salesforce PDII (Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II) within the Platform Developer II path.
The Platform Developer II exam uses multiple formats to assess both conceptual knowledge and hands-on reasoning. Questions progress in difficulty and reflect real-world development decisions you'll encounter on the job.
An effective study plan breaks the five core topics into weekly milestones and combines concept review with hands-on practice. Dedicate time to both breadth (understanding all domains) and depth (mastering high-weight topics like testing and performance). Track your progress regularly so you can adjust focus before exam day.
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Testing, Debugging, and Deployment typically accounts for a significant portion of the exam, as it directly impacts code quality and production stability. Performance optimization and Advanced Developer Fundamentals are equally important because they test deep platform knowledge. Allocate study time proportionally: spend extra hours on these three domains while maintaining solid coverage of User Interface and Process Automation.
In practice, these domains overlap constantly. A Lightning component (User Interface) must be tested thoroughly (Testing & Debugging), optimized for speed (Performance), built with secure Apex code (Advanced Fundamentals), and often integrated with flows or APIs (Process Automation & Integration). Understanding these connections helps you see why a choice in one area affects decisions in another, a critical skill the exam tests.
Salesforce recommends at least two years of development experience and a passing Platform Developer I certification before tackling PDII. Hands-on labs are essential: build custom components, write test classes, deploy to sandboxes, and debug real issues. Practice with Trailhead modules on Lightning, Apex testing, and APIs to reinforce concepts before your exam.
Candidates often overlook governor limits and assume code will scale without optimization. Others misunderstand when to use declarative solutions (flows) versus code, or skip reading scenario details carefully. A frequent error is underestimating the importance of test coverage and deployment best practices, these aren't just nice-to-have, they're core exam content. Review your practice test mistakes twice to avoid repeating them.
Stop learning new topics three days before the exam; instead, review weak areas and take a full-length practice test under timed conditions. On the final two days, do light review of high-weight topics (testing, performance, fundamentals) and read through your notes. Get good sleep the night before, rest is as important as cramming. On exam day, read each question carefully, flag uncertain items, and return to them after completing easier questions.
Universal Containers decided to use Salesforce to manage a new hire interview process. A custom object called Candidate was created with organization-wide defaults set to Private. A lookup on the Candidate object sets an employee as an Interviewer.
What should be used to automatically give Read access to the record when the lookup field is set to the Interviewer user?
A sharing rule can be used to automatically give Read access to a user specified in a lookup field. Sharing rules are declarative and can be based on criteria such as the value of a lookup field. This can be done without writing code and is maintainable through the Salesforce UI.
An Apex class does not achieve expected code coverage. The testsetup method explicitly calls a method In the Apex class..
How can the developer generate the code coverage?
When an Apex class does not achieve the expected code coverage, it suggests that the test methods are not executing parts of the class. The @testvisible annotation can be used to increase code coverage by allowing test methods to access private or protected members of another class. This enables the test method to call methods that may not be directly accessible, but it is not a direct means to generate code coverage. The code coverage is actually achieved when the test methods execute the code within these methods. Therefore, to properly generate code coverage, the developer must ensure that the test methods call the relevant portions of the code that need to be covered. The use of @testvisible can facilitate this process by making otherwise inaccessible code available for testing.
Apex Developer Guide - Testing Best Practices
Apex Developer Guide - @testVisible Annotation
Just prior to a new deployment the Salesforce administrator, who configured a new order fulfillment process feature in a developer sandbox, suddenly left the company.
Ag part of the UAT cycle, the users had fully tested all of the changes in the sandbox and signed off on them; making the Order fulfillment feature ready for its go-live in the production environment.
Unfortunately, although a Change Set was started, it was not completed by the former administrator.
A developer is brought in to finish the deployment.
What should the developer do to identify the configuration changes that need to be moved into production?
To identify the configuration changes made by the former administrator, the developer should leverage the Setup Audit Trail. This allows tracking changes made in the Setup area of Salesforce, showing the date of the change, who made it, and what the change was.
Which three Visualforce components can be used to initiate Ajax behavior to perform partial page updates?
Choose 3 answers
Visualforce Guide
Which statement is true regarding savepoints?
When rolling back to a savepoint, any DML operations that occurred after that savepoint are undone, but static variables are not reverted. Therefore, when a rollback occurs, the state of all static variables at the time of the rollback remains the same as it was just before the rollback.
