Lately, I’ve been working on a lot of dynamic apex and soql. I had a requirement to develop a custom appexchange app that could be dynamically querying objects based on a mapping that the admin had supplied and had stored in custom settings. Originally, I was querying to see if the field existed and returning…
When creating applications it’s a pretty common request to be able to create a formatted report or file in pdf file format.
For the most part, most customized pages and data can be easily converted into a PDF file without having to make many changes. In Salesforce, we can change customized Visualforce pages to create a pdf file by using the renderAs property and set the value to pdf.
A few weeks ago, I saw a post on Twitter about Kevin Poorman releasing a new book about programming in Salesforce Apex and really mastering the development environment. Kevin Poorman’s “Mastering Application Development with Force.com” covers a lot of different parts of Salesforce’s Force.com platform that aren’t well covered elsewhere.
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jQuery is one of the most utilized JavaScript libraries and can be easily be integrated into any visualforce page regardless of whether it’s meant for your internal users or on a force.com site. jQuery is usually used for manipulating elements in the DOM, animation or even event handling. Usually, I use it for doing some in…
I recently had a requirement to dynamically determine what fields had been set or queried on a sObject, so that a comparison could be done on what was actually stored in Salesforce’s Datastore. Surprisingly, there’s no way method on the sObject that let’s you tell what’s actually been queried or set. So without further ado,…
Salesforce has quite a bit of built in security; and has lots of security features that can be customized. Access to most parts of the Salesforce / Force.com platform isn’t actually available until a user has been authenticated. A few weeks ago, I began studying for Admin Certifications, and was fortunate to find this photo…
Practical Salesforce.com Development Without Code written by Phil Weinmeister has been recently released. I think the book really targets those new to the Salesforce platform and does a wonderful job of providing examples and providing a reference that will be useful in the future. Phil Weinmeister has done a phenomenal job putting together some different…
Bootstrap is a free and really popular open source CSS framework that works pretty well for designing responsive websites and web applications. Under the hood, it’s a giant collection of handy reusable bits of code written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. By incorporating Bootstrap into Visualforce pages we are able to some pretty good looking…
Automated testing confirms whether a piece of particular code is working correctly. And, its no secret, that writing automated tests helps decrease bugs and locate existing bugs. Why write test methods? Test Methods are required to deploy Apex to a production environment. In Salesforce, all classes must have at least 75% code coverage. If you…
Releasing changes from a sandbox into production Salesforce can be an interesting time as a developer. As your instance gains more and more code, and tests, the amount of time it takes for changes to deploy increases. Quick deploy is a relatively new feature that can deploy components up to 96 hours after they have…
Salesforce has finally introduced a way to create test data for an entire test class; this will be a huge time savings for developers. The rollback of records created during execution happens at the end of the test class’ execution. By only inserting records once, we should see tests run faster and require less system…
When Salesforce introduced Trailhead in the Dreamforce 2014 Developer Keynote I wasn’t overly excited. Trailhead is Salesforce’s Learning Platform; it’s designed to teach you how to administer and program in force.com Over the last few months, it’s really started to come together and offer lots of interesting content, and challenges. Overview Trailhead consists of three…
Since I’ve started developing for Salesforce one thing that has always frustrated me is that the apex:pageBlockSection’s header wasn’t collapsing the section when it was clicked. In this post, I’ve provided example code that will allow you to make headers collapsible when clicked by the user. By adding the below JavaScript, we can easily add…
Salesforce’s Spring 15 release is going to include mapping and geolocation for address fields. I believe, location based features started appearing before I started using Salesforce. Even more exciting, is that visualforce will include a map component. The mapping component appears to be using Google Maps, but this could probably change. The new mapping component…
In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to correctly do Callouts from Apex Triggers. Salesforce doesn’t allow External Callouts to directly happen from Apex Triggers. You will get the error “Callout from triggers are currently not supported’.
Visualforce is Salesforce’s MVC style pages. In this blog post, we’ll cover how to display error messages in a Visualforce page and how to add error messages.
One of the hands on training sessions I attended was “Write Apex Tests Using Best Practices” which really proved to me that a lot of what I believed and was doing were right. Without further ado, here’s my notes: Goals for tests Auomated methods that verify application integrity Future Proof Proactively Identify Problems before they…
Why use patterns: patterns help us be more efficient patterns describe reusable solutions to common problems Bulk Processing Caching create triggers w/ ability to process hundreds of lookups challenge: queries, DML, memory collect all keys from trigger object in Set Object Query once using SOQL in clause with key set cache results in map object…
I was really blessed to be able to attend Dreamforce and learn even more about Salesforce. While attending there, I attended a lot of the different keynotes and saw a lot of the new exciting features in action. Dreamforce Sessions At Dreamforce there was dozens of interesting sounding sessions. There were a few different ones…
In Salesforce, the first three characters of a record Id are the “Object Id Prefix”.
