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Are you looking for a way to migrate your existing Salesforce Apex code with sforce.connection.query to its Lightning equivalent? You’ve come to the right place!

The sforce.connection.query class is used to execute SOQL queries in Salesforce JavaScript buttons.

As you probably know, JavaScript buttons are not supported in Lightning Experience (LEX). In particular, you can’t use REQUIRESCRIPT.

In this post, the idea is to show how to migrate a particular JavaScript button that uses sforce.connection.query sentence.

Suppose our JavaScript button is like this:

{!REQUIRESCRIPT("/soap/ajax/37.0/connection.js")} 
{!REQUIRESCRIPT("/soap/ajax/37.0/apex.js")} 
var query ="SELECT Id, Name FROM Account LIMIT 10";
var queryRecords= sforce.connection.query(query);
var records = queryRecords.getArray("records"); 
//Do something with the records...

A Lightning equivalent solution requires several steps. I assume that you have some knowledge about Lightning Components development as well as Apex development.

Well, let’s go!

Create a Lightning component called MyQueryResult and Its JavaScript controller

MyQueryResult.cmp

<aura:component controller="MyQueryResultService" >
 <aura:attribute name="queryResult" type="SObject[]" />
 <aura:handler name="init" value="{!this}" action="{!c.doInit}"/>
 
    <!-- It just displays the results. Modify It depending on your needs -->
    <aura:iteration items="{! v.queryResult}" var="item">
        {!item.Id} - {!item.Name}<br/>
     </aura:iteration>
</aura:component>

MyQueryResult.js

({
    doInit : function(component, event, helper) {
        var myQuery = 'SELECT Id, Name FROM Account LIMIT 10';
        var action = component.get("c.executeQuery");
        action.setParams({
            "theQuery": myQuery
        });
        action.setCallback(this, function(response) {
            var state = response.getState();
            if(state == "SUCCESS" && component.isValid()){
                console.log("success") ;
                var queryResult = response.getReturnValue();
                console.log(queryResult);
                component.set("v.queryResult", queryResult);
            }else{
                console.error("fail:" + response.getError()[0].message); 
            }
        });
        $A.enqueueAction(action);
    }
})

We will need also a service  (an Apex class) to execute our query

MyQueryResultService

public class MyQueryResultService {
    @AuraEnabled
    public static List<sObject> executeQuery(String theQuery){
        try{
            String query = String.escapeSingleQuotes(theQuery);
            return Database.query(query);
        }catch(Exception e){
            throw new AuraHandledException('Error doing the query: '+theQuery+' Error: '+e.getMessage());
        }
    }
}

After that, we need a quick action pointing to our component.

The last step is to add our quick action to the layouts we need

Read more about this at Lightning Alternatives to JavaScript Buttons