Enhance LocalDev to Support Aura-Enabled Component Calls in LWC Development

[BradyNadeau]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I'm frustrated that the Local Development (LocalDev) feature for Lightning Web Components (LWC) in Salesforce doesn’t fully support calling Aura-enabled components or making remote Apex calls. This significantly limits the usefulness of LocalDev for larger projects that have data dependencies and need to interact with remote data and server-side logic to accurately simulate and test their functionality.

Describe the solution you'd like

I’d like LocalDev to support:

1. Calling Aura-enabled components from LWCs, which is often needed for inter-component communication in complex applications.
2. Allowing remote Apex calls to be executed from a LocalDev instance, which would let developers work with real data and server-side logic during local development, creating a more accurate development experience and eliminating the need to deploy or run tests in an org just to interact with these elements.

This would greatly enhance LocalDev’s usability for projects with complex data and component dependencies, making it an essential tool for all development phases.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Alternatives considered include:

1. Running all development and testing in a sandbox environment, which is less efficient as it requires deployment for each iteration.
2. Simulating data with static JSON files or mocks, which doesn’t accurately reflect real-world interactions and limits testing scope and accuracy.

Additional context

Adding support for Aura-enabled component calls and remote Apex calls in LocalDev would make the local development experience more robust, especially for developers working on projects with complex interactions and data dependencies. This enhancement would streamline development processes and improve the overall experience for those working on larger, data-intensive projects.

[ravijayaramappa]

@BradyNadeau Can you share sample components that utilize these two features that you mentioned? Aura-enabled components or making remote Apex calls. Specifically, if you can highlight what code changes are you making in your LWC it would be really helpful to understand the usecase.

Also, by "AuraEnable component call" I assume you are referring to this: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/platform/lwc/guide/apex-import-method.html. Are you invoking the apex methods as a @wire adapter or imperatively?