7 Architectural Lessons from Building with the Tooling API
Salesforce, Thursday, October 29th, 2026
A Salesforce developer shares seven architectural lessons from building an open-source Flow Version Cleaner on the Tooling API.
The author built a tool to prune obsolete flow versions, a chore that blocks field deletions and refactors in orgs with thousands of accumulated versions.
The post covers lessons on assumptions that break at run time, handling dependencies and unexpected requirements, keeping reliable state across asynchronous executions, and designing destructive operations to fail safely.
The tool's rules include never deleting the active flow version, which Salesforce rejects anyway, and retaining versions newer than the active one since they may be under review or staged.