Salesforce Salesforce Certified Platform Integration Architect (Plat-Arch-204) Integration-Architect Exam Dumps: Updated Questions & Answers (January 2026)

For HR synchronization requiring high reliability and a multi-day data retention window, Change Data Capture (CDC) is the optimal architectural choice.12

CDC is an event-driven integration framework that automatically publ3ishes change events for Sale4sforce records (Create, Update, Delete, and Undelete). A critical feature of CDC for failure recovery is its 72-hour (3-day) retention window. If the external HR system or the replication middleware experience downtime, the change events remain stored in the Salesforce event bus for up to three days. Once the HR system is back online, the subscriber can use the Replay ID of the last successfully processed event to retrieve all missed notifications from the bus, ensuring zero data loss during the outage.

In contrast, Outbound Messaging (Option B) only provides a 24-hour retry window. If the target system is unavailable for more than one day, the notifications are dropped, making it unsuitable for a 3-day requirement. Callouts (Option C) are typically synchronous and do not have native, platform-managed storage or retry mechanisms for failed requests; once a callout fails, the data is lost unless a custom retry architecture is built. CDC’s native, durable event bus provides the necessary scalability and resilience for critical HR data synchronization without requiring complex custom code for error handling and data recovery.

When designing a solution that requires Salesforce to receive and display updates from a back-end ERP (such as order status changes), message durability is a critical factor for ensuring data consistency. In an event-driven architecture using Platform Events or Change Data Capture (CDC), Salesforce utilizes an event bus to handle these incoming notifications.

For high-volume event messages, the Salesforce platform provides a native 72-hour (3-day) retention window. This is a significant architectural advantage for several reasons:

System Resilience: If the Salesforce org or the integration middleware experiences a temporary disruption or is undergoing maintenance, the event messages published by the ERP remain stored in the bus for up to 3 days.

Data Recovery: Once the connection is restored, the subscribing system (Salesforce) can use the Replay ID to catch up on any missed events from the last 72 hours, ensuring that order stages like "Order Shipped" or "Order Paid" are not missed.

SLA Management: This 3-day window exceeds the 24-hour limit of older technologies like PushTopics or Outbound Messaging (Option A), providing more breathing room for disaster recovery scenarios.

While ReplayID -1 (Option C) is used to subscribe only to new events published after the subscription starts, it does not address the durability or retention of historical events needed for recovery. By highlighting the 72-hour retention window, the integration architect provides a design that is robust against outages and guarantees that the "System of Engagement" (Salesforce) stays synchronized with the "System of Record" (ERP).

When proposing Platform Events as an integration mechanism, an architect must ensure that the security model is correctly configured to allow for the publication and subscription of events. Unlike standard objects, Platform Events have specific permission requirements for the "Integration User" or any system entity interacting with the event bus.

For an external system to subscribe to a Platform Event stream (via CometD or the Pub/Sub API), the user account used to authenticate the connection must have the "Read" permission on the specific Platform Event entity. Similarly, if the external system needs to publish events back into Salesforce, the user must have "Create" permissions. These permissions are typically managed through a Profile or a Permission Set assigned to the Integration User.

Regarding the other options, Option A is incorrect because Platform Events are designed for asynchronous communication. They are inherently decoupled; the external system does not need the same uptime as Salesforce. High-volume platform events are stored in the event bus for 72 hours, allowing an external system to "catch up" using a Replay ID once it comes back online. Option C is also incorrect because Platform Events follow a Publish/Subscribe pattern. Salesforce "broadcasts" the event to the bus without needing to know which specific external systems are listening. This decoupling is a primary advantage of event-driven architecture, as it allows for a "one-to-many" distribution model where multiple systems can consume the same message without additional configuration within Salesforce. Thus, ensuring the correct object-level permissions (Read/Create) is the most critical technical consideration for the architect to guarantee successful message delivery.

To meet a requirement for real-time event capture that supports an external analytics system, the arc14hitect must choose a pattern that is scalable, decoupled, and reliable. Platform Events are the modern standard for this use case.

By using a Case Trigger to publish a specific Platform Event, NTO creates a highly decoupled Publish/Subscribe architecture. The external analytics system (or a middleware layer feeding it) acts as a subscriber to the event channel. This is superior to standard callouts or outbound messaging for several reasons:

Durability: Platform Events offer a 72-hour retention window. If the analytics system is momentarily offline, it can use the Replay ID to retrieve missed events.

Atomic Transactions: Triggers can be configured to publish events only after the database transaction successfully commits ("Publish After Commit"), ensuring the analytics system doesn't receive data for transactions that were eventually rolled back.

Event Volume: Platform Events are designed to handle much higher volumes of real-time messages than standard synchronous callouts.

Option A (Apex Callouts) is a point-to-point, synchronous pattern that would block Case processing and risk hitting "Concurrent Long-Running Request" limits. Option B (Outbound Messaging) is reliable but is limited to a single object per message and uses a rigid SOAP format that is less flexible for ad-hoc external analytics than the modern JSON/CometD/gRPC structures used by the event bus. By implementing Option C, the architect ensures that every specific business milestone (refund, exchange, cancellation) is broadcasted immediately, providing the customer service director with the accurate, real-time visibility required for trending and metrics.

When an enterprise architect identifies infrastructure-level requirements such as caching, queuing, and complex event handling, it signals a need for a dedicated integration layer. Salesforce is an engagement platform, not a dedicated message broker or Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). For complex event handling in a publish/subscribe scenario, the architect should recommend leveraging middleware to act as the central nervous system of the integration landscape.

The middleware provides a robust environment to manage the lifecycle of a message. It can receive a single event from a publisher (like Salesforce via Platform Events) and then route that message to multiple active subscribers. This decoupling ensures that Salesforce doesn't need to manage the connection state or retry logic for every downstream system. Middleware tools are specifically designed to handle "Quality of Service" (QoS) requirements like guaranteed delivery, message sequencing, and dead-letter queuing, which are difficult to manage natively at scale within Salesforce limits.

Option A is incorrect because shifting from Fire-and-Forget to Request-Reply generally decreases performance and scalability due to the synchronous nature of the wait time. Option C is also incorrect; protocol translation (e.g., SOAP to REST) and heavy message transformation are exactly what middleware tools are built for. By performing these tasks in middleware, you conserve Salesforce’s Apex CPU limits and maintain a cleaner, more maintainable CRM environment. Therefore, using middleware for routing and event handling is the standard architectural recommendation for a mature enterprise program.

For a unified service experience between Salesforce Service Cloud and B2C Commerce (formerly Demandware), Salesforce provides a purpose-built, cross-cloud solution known as the Salesforce B2C Commerce to Service Cloud Connector.

This connector is part of the Salesforce B2C Solution Architecture and is designed to provide "out-of-the-box" synchronization of data between the two platforms. By implementing this connector, service agents gain several high-value capabilities within the Service Console:

Customer Profile Sync: Ensures that customer data (name, address, etc.) is consistent across both systems.

Order History View: Allows agents to see real-time order data from the Commerce system directly within the Case record page.

Order on Behalf Of: Enables agents to place orders for customers without leaving Salesforce.

While you could build a custom integration using the Commerce REST API (Option B) or MuleSoft (Option C), these would require significant development, testing, and maintenance effort. The Salesforce B2C Connector is the recommended "path of least resistance" because it leverages Salesforce's own pre-built logic for cross-cloud interoperability, reducing technical debt and time-to-value. For an architect, choosing the standard1 connector ensures better supportability and future-proofing 2as Salesforce continues to enhance its multi-cloud features.

The Tooling API is specifically designed for developer-centric tools that need fine-grained access to Salesforce metadata and runtime information. It exposes specialized objects like ApexCodeCoverage, ApexCodeCoverageAggregate, and ApexTestResult. These objects allow external applications to query the results of test runs and specific line-by-line coverage metrics. While the Metadata API (Option A) is used for deployments, it does not provide the same granular query access to test execution results. The Tooling API is the industry standard for integrating Salesforce into enterprise CI/CD pipelines and quality dashboards.

Platform Eve9nt triggers run asynchronously unde10r the "Automated Process" system user, which makes troubleshooting their failures in production difficult through standard user-level monitoring. When a trigger fails consistently after rollout, the integration architect must be able to inspect the specific execution errors and governor limit consumption.

The recommended approach is to set up debug logs for Platform Event triggers. By configuring a debug log for the Automated Process user, the architect can capture the full execution trace of the trigger. This allows the team to identify the root cause of the failure, such as:

Uncaught Exceptions: Null pointer exceptions or DML failures that occur during record updates.

Governor Limit Breaches: Exceeding CPU time or SOQL query limits within the trigger's execution context.

Logic Errors: Issues in the custom code responsible for processing the prediction score.

Option A focuses on high-level consumption limits; while important, it would not explain why a trigger is failing if the events are being successfully published. Option C is a design-time validation step and would not provide insight into a runtime failure. Proactive monitoring through debug logs provides the granular technical visibility required to maintain a reliable, AI-driven integration in a production environment.

When building custom mobile or web applications that aim to replicate the look and feel of Salesforce Lightning Experience, the User Interface (UI) API is the architecturally recommended choice.

The UI API is specifically designed to provide the metadata and data needed to build high-fidelity user interfaces. Unlike the standard REST API (Option B), which returns raw record data, the UI API returns both data and metadata in a single response. This includes information about page layouts, field-level security, picklist values, and localized labels. By using the UI API, the mobile app can dynamically render fields according to the user's permissions and the organization's layout configurations, ensuring that the custom app stays in sync with changes made in Salesforce Setup without requiring code updates in the mobile app.

Connect REST API (Option A) is primarily used for Chatter, Communities (Experience Cloud), and CMS content, and while it is useful for those specific social features, it does not provide the layout and record-level metadata required for a full CRM interface. The UI API is the same underlying technology that powers the Salesforce mobile app and Lightning Experience itself. Therefore, utilizing this API allows NTO's developers to build a native app that perfectly mimics the Lightning Experience while reducing the amount of custom logic needed to handle complex Salesforce UI requirements.