Salesforce

Three Reasons Why You Should Do Away From Force.com Sites!

2010-03-05T12:06:00.001-05:00

Working on several large projects in the past to address community needs in the CRM arena, force.com Sites seems to be an attractive and suitable choice which directly integrates with your CRM application. You can open up and share your CRM tabs, objects and data to your target community on the web and it's all fully secure.

The basic customer portal theme seem to be a bit tasteless if you are to use the standard Visualforce components however utilizing them has two benefits, first and the most important is speed in delivery of the project, secondly if you are to add your ideas or solutions, as is, then all your tabs and pages would enjoy the same look and feel.

However, there are some major issues that Salesforce.com still needs to address before this platform is fully ready for large scale projects.

Here are some of those, I came across:

1) Stability
Since the technology is fairly new and Salesforce.com is rapidly trying to introduce new ones and get ahead of the competition, it seems that they inevitably had to make some sacrifices. In many cases I encountered bugs that could have been easily caught and removed from the system.
One example of which is the sign up process in force.con customer portals, when a new user registers, two records will be created, a Contact record and Portal User record. The Contact record should be linked to an Account record as well.
The problem is that if you created an account at the sign-up time and then tried to link the new Contact to that Account, because the Guest user in Salesforce.com does not have a role and therefore can not be the owner of an account in Salesforce then the whole process would fail (so why allowing the guest user to create an Account in the security profile!). Furthermore, if the Account owner is a deactivated-user, the same error would be thrown!

In many other cases I encountered styling issues, where, in ajax calls the portal styles would go nuts or I heard some user complains from that the pages were not behaving/rendering the same way in different browsers.

Funny thing is that even if you turn off standard styling in your visualforce page, force.com still includes them in your pages, causeing conflicts and a lot of headache!

2) Diagnostics
There are no system diagnostics provided to you out-of-the-box. You are on your own to implement one to be able to find out what's going on with the internet users trying to sign up, login and use your customer portal!

The thing that makes the sites de-bug and diagnostic process very hard is that it runs your visualforce pages on a different security model (two different profiles compare to standard profiles in Salesforce) which you can not mimic in your own salesforce.com environment.So you are forced to create sample portal users and browse it like any other user and see/test it for yourself. The downside to this is that the errors are not really shown to you properly when you are logged in as a Guest user or Customer portal User.

In many cases, I saw as a result of an Apex exception the user sees the "under construction" page!!
Even though you have specifically configured your site to show your own custom error page! Also if the user browses a page URL that does not exists.... they do not necessarily always see your 404 error page but rather the one and only "under construction" page again!!

All for you to rely on is the famous Apex error notification email which potentially can indicate something went wrong for a user. The other problem is that only the last person who has deployed the code receives these emails. In larger projects were a group of developers are working on the tasks, this does not seem to be a practical solution to provide diagnostics.

3) Profile Limitations
Salesforce is imposing several security limitations on sites and customer portals that do not exist with API integrations. So folks who are using an external application as their community portal and integrate with Salesforce enjoy more freedom than others who want to utilize force.com sites!

One example of which is that the customer portal profile can not update Contact records. This is all nice if you want to protect your business data and separate them from user's profile data. However, in many business cases your requirement may be to add a few custom fields on the contact record and make them available to the portal (as a self-service data management type of business operations, where possible you'd rather have the customer manage their own data).

I have seen people adding that to the ideas site, but this is a practical need which is not available at the moment in force.com sites.

Utilizing the Power of Batch Apex and Async Operations

2010-02-01T13:39:00.002-05:00

If you have tried before to remove custom object records in bulk from your org, you know the hassle you need to go through to export the records into an excel file and then have the DataLoader delete those records.

Not only that, what if you need to perform further data integrity tasks before removing the records?

Mass updating, inserting and other similar scenarios like this can be more conveniently handled with force.com's Batch Apex. With Batch Apex you can now build complex, long-running processes on the platform. This feature is very useful for time to time data cleansing, archiving or data quality improvement operations.

One thing that you need to consider is that you should trigger the batch job using Apex code only and force.com by default does not provide scheduling feature your batchable Apex classes. In order to do that you need to write Apex class that implements a "Schedulable" interface.

The following example shows how you can utilize the model to mass delete records of any object in force.com platform.

In order to develop your Batch Apex, you need to create a new Apex class which extends "Database.Batchable" interface.

This interface demands for three methods to be implemented:

start
execute
finish

"start" method is called at the beginning of a batch Apex job. Use this method to collect the records (of objects) to be passed to the "execute" method for processing. The Apex engine, automatically breaks the massive numbers of records you selected into smaller batches and repeatedly calls the "execute" method until all records are processed.

The "finish" method is called once all the batches are processed. You can use this method to carry out any post-processing operation such as sending out an email confirmation on the status of the batch operation.

Let's take a closer look at each of these methods:

global Database.QueryLocator start(Database.BatchableContext BC) {
//passing the query string to the Database object.      
return Database.getQueryLocator(query);
}

Use the Database.getQueryLocator in the "start" method to dynamically load data into the Batch Apex class. Using a Querylocator object, the governor limit for the total number of records retrieved from the database is bypassed.

Alternatively you can use the iterable when you need to create a complex scope for your batch job.

Execute method:

global void execute(Database.BatchableContext BC, List<sObject> scope) {

// in this sample, we simply delete all the records in scope    
delete scope;
}

This method provides two parameters Database.BatchableContext and a list of records (referred to as "scope"). BatchableContext is generally used for tracking the progress of the batch job by all Batchable interface methods. We will use this class more in our "finish" method.

Finish method:

global void finish(Database.BatchableContext BC){
// Get the ID of the AsyncApexJob representing this batch job  
// from Database.BatchableContext.  
// Query the AsyncApexJob object to retrieve the current job's information.  

AsyncApexJob a = [Select Id, Status, NumberOfErrors, JobItemsProcessed,
  TotalJobItems, CreatedBy.Email
  from AsyncApexJob where Id =:BC.getJobId()];
// Send an email to the Apex job's submitter notifying of job completion.  

Messaging.SingleEmailMessage mail = new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage();
String[] toAddresses = new String[] {a.CreatedBy.Email};
mail.setToAddresses(toAddresses);
mail.setSubject('Apex Sharing Recalculation ' + a.Status);
mail.setPlainTextBody
('The batch Apex job processed ' + a.TotalJobItems +
' batches with '+ a.NumberOfErrors + ' failures.');
Messaging.sendEmail(new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage[] { mail });
}

By using the BatchableContext we are able to retrieve the jobId of our batch job. AsyncApexJob object in force.com allows you to gain access to the status of the async jobs as shown in the above example.

In this method I have utilized the Apex email library to send a notification to the owner of the batch job (whoever triggered the job in the first place).

Now, let's put it all together:

global class MassDeleteRecords implements  Database.Batchable<sObject> {

global final string query;

global MassDeleteRecords (String q)
{
   query = q;
}

global Database.QueryLocator start(Database.BatchableContext BC){

   return Database.getQueryLocator(query);
}

global void execute(Database.BatchableContext BC, List<sObject> scope){

  delete scope;
}


global void finish(Database.BatchableContext BC){
  // Get the ID of the AsyncApexJob representing this batch job  
  // from Database.BatchableContext.    
  // Query the AsyncApexJob object to retrieve the current job's information.  

 AsyncApexJob a = [Select Id, Status, NumberOfErrors, JobItemsProcessed,
   TotalJobItems, CreatedBy.Email
   from AsyncApexJob where Id =:BC.getJobId()];

  // Send an email to the Apex job's submitter notifying of job completion.  
  Messaging.SingleEmailMessage mail = new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage();
  String[] toAddresses = new String[] {a.CreatedBy.Email};
  mail.setToAddresses(toAddresses);
  mail.setSubject('Apex Sharing Recalculation ' + a.Status);
  mail.setPlainTextBody('The batch Apex job processed ' + a.TotalJobItems +
    ' batches with '+ a.NumberOfErrors + ' failures.');

  Messaging.sendEmail(new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage[] { mail });
}

}

Ok, that's as far as we go for the Batchable Apex class in this article.

Now let's write the code in Apex to run the class and test it:

String query = 'SELECT id, name FROM Account WHERE OwnerId = \'00520000000h57J\'';
MassDeleteRecords batchApex = new MassDeleteRecords(query );
ID batchprocessid = Database.executeBatch(batchApex);

The above code removes all accounts that the user id= 00520000000h57J owns them.

As it is apparent, now you can run the batch job from within your Visualforce pages, triggers (with caution), etc.

For governing limit and best practices documentation you can refer to the Apex Developer Guide.

Utilizing Apex Pattern and Matcher Classes

2010-01-14T11:26:00.007-05:00

In many projects I am involved with I need to validate a string of data or transform the string into a new one with a specific format. Processing the text by the means of String primitive type methods or your custom handling could a big undertaking and time consuming task.

Sometimes, one needs to write hundreds of lines of code, to process a string and make sure it’s valid (formatted as expected) or transform it into proper format. Some examples of this are validating a string to see if it’s a correct email address, postal code, phone number or URL. Some other examples are grabbing html tags or striping down the XML or HTML tag to get a clear text, trimming the whitespaces, removing duplicate lines or items and many more.

Apex in Force.com platform has just the right set of classes to help you carry out such operations pretty much the same way Java does it.

“A regular expression is a string that is used to match another string, using a specific syntax. Apex supports the use of the regular expression through its Pattern and Matcher classes.” Quoted right from the holly guide. Any regular expression that is written for Java can be used with Apex as well.

In order to utilize these classes we first need to know what each of them does.

Pattern class is designed to contain the regular expression string and you compile the expression into an object of this class. You only need to use this class once. Using this class you will be able to create a Matcher object by passing your string (on which you want to carry out surgery or validation).


pattern myPattern = pattern.compile('(a(b)?)+');

Matcher in turn allows you to do further actions such as checking to see if the string matched the pattern or allows you to manipulate the original string in various ways and produce a new desired one.


matcher myMatcher = myPattern.matcher('aba');

Let’s explore some samples of using regular expressions in Apex and see how we can benefit from them:

My first example will be how to validate an email address. I personally had some struggles with this since the email addresses can get pretty ugly at times. Imagine this email address:

name.lastname_23@ca.gov.on.com


String InputString = 'email@email.com';
String emailRegex = '([a-zA-Z0-9_\\-\\.]+)@((\\[a-z]{1,3}\\.[a-z]{1,3}\\.[a-z]{1,3}\\.)|(([a-zA-Z0-9\\-]+\\.)+))([a-zA-Z]{2,4}|[0-9]{1,3})';
Pattern MyPattern = Pattern.compile(emailRegex);

// Then instantiate a new Matcher object "MyMatcher"
Matcher MyMatcher = MyPattern.matcher(InputString);

if (!MyMatcher.matches()) {
// invalid, do something
}

Some more examples on validations:


// to validate a password
String RegualrExpression_Password = '((?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*[@#$%]).{6,20})';

//image file extention
String RegualrExpression_ImgFileExt = '([^\s]+(\.(?i)(jpg|png|gif|bmp))$)';

//to validate an IP Address
String RE_IP = '^([01]?\\d\\d?|2[0-4]\\d|25[0-5])\\.([01]?\\d\\d?|2[0-4]\\d|25[0-5])\\.([01]?\\d\\d?|2[0-4]\\d|25[0-5])\\.([01]?\\d\\d?|2[0-4]\\d|25[0-5])$';

//date format (dd/mm/yyyy)
String RE_date = '(0?[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])/(0?[1-9]|1[012])/((19|20)\\d\\d)';

//to match links tag "A" in HTML
String RE_ATags = '(?i)<a([^>]+)>(.+?)</a>';

Another way that you can benefit from the Matcher class to to reformat the string.

Below is an example that shows you, how you can strip the HTML tags from a string and extract the plain text. This is very useful when you want to record email contents into Salesforce or covert the HTML version of an email into it's plain text counterpart.


string html = 'your html code';
 //first replace all <BR> tags with \n to support new lines
string result = html.replaceAll('<br/>', '\n');
result = result.replaceAll('<br />', '\n');

//regular expression to match all HTML/XML tags
string HTML_TAG_PATTERN = '<.*?>';

// compile the pattern     
pattern myPattern = pattern.compile(HTML_TAG_PATTERN);

// get your matcher instance
matcher myMatcher = myPattern.matcher(result);

//remove the tags     
result = myMatcher.replaceAll('');

For complete reference of Java regular expressions please refer to: here

Flex Rich Clients and Complex Logics!

2009-12-31T17:23:00.003-05:00

Nowadays many developers are driven or forced toward using richer UIs such as Adobe Flex by their customers. Using Adobe Flex and AIR technologies you can create fancy user interfaces with drag and drop functionality, applications that easily integrates with force.com Webservice APIs, takes the data offline and syncs it back to the source once connected to internet again.

All that is very interesting and cool, however one should bear in mind that all the operations, Web Service calls, etc are running in the user's browser (client machine) not on force.com servers.

For this very specific reason, one has to consider how to best design the applications to utilize the cloud computing power of force.com technology and leave the chunk of heavy operations (program logic) out of the client's machine.

The following example which is proven to be useless in the real world, shows you how to host your main operations (chunk of code) in the force.com platform and then share them in form of Web Service methods with your flex applications.

I first start with creating a new Apex class which is pretty much the same as any other Apex class you have seen before but with a few minor changes.

The Apex class is where I intend to do my main operation. I'd rather use my Flex application to utilize such Apex classes and merely view the data in proper form to the user (where possible).

Points:

Any Apex class which wants to share a method over the web needs to be marked as "global"
Any method of this class that must be reachable by our Flex app should be mark as "WebService"
Any internal variable or class that are used in the parameter or as output of the WebService methods also needs to be marked as "WebService".

Below is the implementation of a sample Apex class which shares a method as "WebService".


global class MyWebService
{
global class CompositeData
{
   WebService String CompanyName;
   WebService String FullName;
   WebService String Id;
}

Webservice static MyWebService.CompositeData[] SearchContacts(String keywords)
{
   List<CompositeData> results = new List<CompositeData>();

   //search logic.
   List<List<SObject>> data = [Find :keywords IN ALL FIELDS
     RETURNING Contact (id, Name, Account.Name)];

   List<SObject> contacts = data[0];

   for(SObject contact : contacts)
   {
       CompositeData cd = new CompositeData();
    
       cd.Id = contact.Id;
       cd.FullName = ((Contact)contact).Name;
       cd.CompanyName = ((Contact)contact).Account.Name;
    
    
       results.add(cd);
   }

   return results;
}
}

The above example demonstrates how you can share a such class as structure other than Apex's SObject class.

This allows you to run multiple queries and aggregate data from various objects in force.com platform and then return them back to the Flex application using the new structure ("CompositeData" in this example).

Now let's see how we can use the above method in our Flex application. Let's say that we use a Flex wrapper class to call this Apex method and then expose this class (Flex class) to our Flex application.

I believe the comments in the code should guide you through the steps.


package com
{
  import com.salesforce.AsyncResponder;
  import com.salesforce.Connection;
  import com.salesforce.objects.Parameter;
  import com.salesforce.results.Fault;

  import mx.collections.ArrayCollection;
  import mx.controls.Alert;



  public class MyFlexWebServiceClient
  {
    
      //a public property to provide access to the final results
      public var results : ArrayCollection;
    
      //force.com connection object
      private var binding : Connection;
    
      //the class constructor 
      public function MyFlexWebServiceClient()
      {
          results = new ArrayCollection();
      }
    
      // this method will be called from the Flex application script
      // section once it is instantiated
      public function init(Connection sfdcConnection)
      {
          //the class receive the SFDC connection object from the parent application
          this.binding = sfdcConnection;
        
          if (!this.binding.IsLoggedIn)
           throw new Error("Connection to the server is not available.");
      }
    
      //this method is the wrapper method that calls the force.com webservice 
      public function execute(keywords: String): void
      {
          //validation
          if (keywords == null || keywords.length <= 0)
          {
              //handle the invalid data
              return;
          }   
        
          //preparing the parameters of the web service method
          var params : Array = new Array(1);
           
          var param1 : com.salesforce.objects.Parameter = new Parameter("keywords", keywords);
          params[0] = param1;
        
          // using SFDC Aysync Responder to get the results in flex
          var tempCallBack: AsyncResponder = new AsyncResponder(
          function(result:Object):void {
            
              if (result != null)
                this.results = result as ArrayCollection;
              else
                Alert.show("Result is empty.", "Info");
          },
          function(result: Fault):void { Alert.show("Operation failed", "Error");  }
          );
        
          // call the execute method of the SFDC connection object to reach out the web service
          binding.execute("MyWebService", "SearchContacts", params, tempCallBack);
        
      }

  }
}

Happy holidays and new year!

Salesforce.com Winter 10 Release...What's in it for you?

2009-09-18T10:11:00.003-04:00

This Tuesday, Salesforce.com announced the release of Winter 10 version and explored new features that soon will be added to the mix. Right off the bat I would like to declare that this new release has a lot of more to offer compare to the previous one and I thank Salesforce for that!

The highlight of the new features is the Realtime Quotes that will be available soon to all Salesforce.com customers. In any sales environment one of the aspects of the Sales process is to be able to track what goods potential and existing customers are interested to purchase and Salesforce supports that by the means of Opportunities.

The one thing that always bugged me though was that Salesforce did not have a feature to allow communication of that information (in terms of Quotes or Invoices) to those customers as soon as the deals reached to a more solid state (proposing or closing).

I believe Salesforce is very late in the game to introduce this feature and already many customers have sought other means to fill that gap and now most will face the question whether to migrate the existing solutions to what's provided out-of-the-box or stay with their current vendors...

Also the fact that Salesforce PriceBooks are not customizable hinders the possibility of tailoring Salesforce to any specific pricing calculation model. Concepts such as automated Volume Discounts calculation that could be applied to Opportunity line items, or any other custom pricing models.

Moving on, on the Custom Cloud side, Salesforce yet again is gaining momentum by introducing "Batch Code Processor" and "Code Scheduler".
Many admins in the past, in order to process event-driven data to be able to provide custom roll-ups, Analytics and better summary-data visibility of child objects in the system, were forced to max out their workflow rules or develop triggers which most of the time would hit the Governing Limits or just fail in bulk DML operations.

With these new features many of those scenarios can be easily addressed and even more complex logic can be applied to solve problems and fulfill business requirements!
Cases such as data de-dupping, data heath checks, rebuilding account hierarchies.... Sky is the limit!

Edit and Delete Command For Your Datatable In Visualforce

2009-09-12T14:03:00.006-04:00

Most often that not you need to show data to the users in form of a table, such as Salesforce List Views or Related Lists.

Visualforce allows us to easily implement such page with a few lines of code. However, most often you would want to be able to add more interactivity/functionality to your page by supporting Edit or Delete command or any other custom operation that is required by design.

Today's article will show you how you can get that working for you.

Above picture depicts how the final result will look like, very much like Salesforce.com standard pages, isn't it?.

In this example I list the first twenty Account records that Apex finds and show then on the screen and then I would like to have actions such as "Edit" that forwards the user to Account edit page and brings the user back to my page again after the modifications are done and also "Delete" action that receives a confirmation from user and removes an Account record from Salesforce CRM.

So let's talk about the User Interface (UI) components required first and then we will look into the controller's code to see how it all works together.

Steps to add the page tags:

I first add a PageBlock component and set the title to "Accounts"
Then I want to put a PageBlockDataTable in the my Visualforce page.
In this step I simply add all the data columns I want to show to the user and leave the first column empty for the next step.
Now we are ready to add the action items to the first column of the dataTable.

Below is the page tags that I have used to make it all happen:


<apex:page controller="DataTableEditRemoveController">
<apex:form id="form" >
<apex:pageBlock title="Accounts">
  <apex:pageMessages ></apex:pageMessages>
  <apex:pageBlockTable value="{!accs}" var="row">
     <apex:column >
       <apex:outputLink title="" value="/{!row.id}/e?retURL=/apex/{!$CurrentPage.Name}" style="font-weight:bold">Edit</apex:outputLink>&nbsp;|&nbsp;
       <a href="javascript:if (window.confirm('Are you sure?')) DeleteAccount('{!row.Id}');" style="font-weight:bold">Del</a>
     </apex:column>
     <apex:column value="{!row.Name}"/>
     <apex:column value="{!row.BillingStreet}"/>
     <apex:column value="{!row.BillingCity}"/>
     <apex:column value="{!row.BillingPostalCode}"/>
     <apex:column value="{!row.BillingCountry}"/>
  </apex:pageBlockTable>
</apex:pageBlock>

<apex:actionFunction action="{!DeleteAccount}" name="DeleteAccount" reRender="form" >
   <apex:param name="accountid" value="" assignTo="{!SelectedAccountId}"/>
</apex:actionFunction>
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

How It Is Done For Edit Action:

Since the standard Account edit page is good enough for me I used an outputLink component to link the record to its Standard Edit page. In Salesforce for standard objects you can follow this format to get the URL for their edit page: /{RecordId}/e

I also wanted this to work in such a way that would return the user back to my Visualforce page once the user clicks on "save" or "cancel" in the Account edit page. In order to do that I need to add the following to the URL: /{RecordId}/e?retURL={returnURL}

In the Page's source code (above) you see that for return URL I have used {!$CurrentPage.Name} merge field, where I could simply put my page name. I like writing code clean! By doing this if you later on decided to change your page name, you do not need to worry about breaking anything! You page will continue to work with no problems!

How It Is Done For Delete Action:

In order to support this action in your page you need to do a bit of coding. The key is to be able to find out which account was selected by the user to be deleted.

In this example I have used a actionFunction component that triggers a Controller's Apex method call "DeleteAccount".

Before getting more into the coding part I wanted this link to get a confirmation from the user about deleting the record before actually we remove it.

In order to do so, we need to use a little bit of Javascript "window.confirm", the javascript function returns true if the user clicks on OK and false if the user selects "Cancel".

In order to capture the user's selection as to which account should be deleted I have added a "param" tag to the actionFunction component which passes the Account ID to the controller and as soon as user clicks on the link.

Now let's take a look at the code:


public class DataTableEditRemoveController {

   public List<Account> accs { get; set; }
  
   //used to get a hold of the account record selected for deletion
   public string SelectedAccountId { get; set; }
  
   public DataTableEditRemoveController() {
       //load account data into our DataTable
       LoadData();
   }
  
   private void LoadData() {
       accs = [Select id, name, BillingStreet, BillingCity, BillingPostalCode, BillingCountry from Account limit 20];
   }
  
   public void DeleteAccount()
   {
      // if for any reason we are missing the reference 
      if (SelectedAccountId == null) {
      
         return;
      }
     
      // find the account record within the collection
      Account tobeDeleted = null;
      for(Account a : accs)
       if (a.Id == SelectedAccountId) {
          tobeDeleted = a;
          break;
       }
      
      //if account record found delete it
      if (tobeDeleted != null) {
       Delete tobeDeleted;
      }
     
      //refresh the data
      LoadData();
   }    
  
  
}

Funny thing is that in my tests if you do not set the "reRender" attribute of the "actionFunnction" component the param is not passed to the controller and the "SelectedAccountId" property is not populated. Go figure....

Also I really wanted to get it working with commandLink or commandButton components instead using actionFucntion and javascript, but was not so lucky!

Enjoy!

Triggering an Apex method with a Custom Button

2009-06-29T11:38:00.005-04:00

Most often Salesforce.com developers want to write a custom logic such as sending a notification email, changing the status of a record (picklist), etc once a button is clicked on, in a standard layout.

The effort is minimized this way since you do not want to recreate the layout using a Visualforce page, all you need is to be able to launch a method once the button is clicked on.

In order to do so, you need to write your logic into an Apex class with following conditions:

Firstly, your class should be marked as "Global"
Secondly, the logic goes to a static method of this class which is marked as "WebService"

If an Apex class has the above characteristics, the method marked as web service can be called via javascript when the button is clicked on. Neat!

I think by now you have a good idea of where I am going with this, so let's dive into code and examine everything more closely.

Below I have created a Apex Class called "OutboundEmails" and added a method that has a keyword as "WebService".


global class OutboundEmails {

WebService static void SendEmailNotification(string id) {

//create a mail object to send a single email.
Messaging.SingleEmailMessage mail = new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage();

//set the email properties
mail.setToAddresses(new string[] {'myemail@domain.com'});
mail.setSenderDisplayName('SF.com Email Agent');
mail.setSubject('A new reminder');
mail.setHtmlBody('an object with ID='+ id + ' is just clicked on.');

//send the email
Messaging.sendEmail(new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage[] { mail } );

}
}

This method receives an object Id (this is just to demo purposes, so you can identify any parameters that you need) and sends an email notification subsequently once the method is called.

Now let's concentrate on the button that will actually call our WebService method.

Firstly, I create a detail page button let's say on Account object and name it "Send Me ID".
This button's behavior will be "Execute Javascript".
If you need more information about how you can add a custom button to Account object please click here. Then I add the following code to the body of the button edit page:


{!REQUIRESCRIPT("/soap/ajax/10.0/connection.js")}
{!REQUIRESCRIPT("/soap/ajax/10.0/apex.js")}
sforce.apex.execute("OutboundEmails","SendEmailNotification", {id:"{!Account.Id}"});
window.alert("Account Id is sent." );

Now It all works together!
Once you click on the button, in case you have not forgotten to change the sample email address with your own in the code, you should receive the email.

How to Create Word, PDF or Excel Files with Salesforce Data

2009-04-07T19:41:00.007-04:00

One of challenges in any software application is being able to export data into different documents using templates for various purposes.

An example of this is using such templates to create custom documents such as Fax sheets, Quotes, Invoices, Forms that are required to be filled out by a person in traditional ways.

Visualforce pages allow us to generate such documents combined with Salesfoce data. The documents can be formatted in number of types such as PDF, Excel, Word, HTML or XML.

In this example I will show how easy it is to generate PDF documents using Visualforce pages adn with adding little bit of your coding skills you can easily create other formats as well (of course with certain limitations).

In order to be able to create PDF pages in Salesforce you meed to know the following:

When using the Page tag, you should set the "showHeader" attribute to "false". By doing this you are telling to Visualforce to do not render any Salesforce header or even HTML tags.
So think about a normal HTML page, which has tags such as "html", "head" and "body" none of these tags are added to your page automatically anymore. So we should add them to the page ourselves when creating PDF files.
Also note that HTML form elements or Apex input controls can not be included into your document.
The other important thing is styling, in order to make your PDF file look professional you need to apply styling skills and add CSS classes to your Visualforce page.
And the last point is to set your "Page" attribute called "renderAs" to "pdf".

Below is a sample PDF generate code with no content:

<apex:page showHeader="false" renderAs="pdf">
<head>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</apex:page>

The next step is to add some styling/formatting options as well as planning for your content.

By applying CSS into you can define a few CSS classes that formats your PDF document the way you need.

However, the following are important features you may want to benefit from, such as the ability to set the PDF file pages orientation (Landscape or portrait), allow page numbers or additional descriptions in PDF file's header or footer, etc.

Some of these examples are shown below:


<apex:page showHeader="false" renderAs="pdf">
<head>
 <style type="text/css">
  @page
  {

    /* Landscape orientation */
    size:landscape;

    /* Put page numbers in the bottom right corner of each
    page in the pdf document. */
    @bottom-right {
      content: "Page " counter(page);
    }
  }

  body {
   font-family: Arial Unicode MS;
   font-size:9pt;
  }


  td {
    font-size:11pt;
    font-family:Tahoma;
  }

  /* you can even define custom classes that utilize your static resources */
  .checkbox
  {
     width: 19px;
     height: 16px;
     background-image:url({!URLFOR($Resource.Checkbox)});
     background-repeat: no-repeat;
  }
</head>
<body>
</body>
</apex:page>

If your requirement is to create Word or Excel files the process would be the same only following changes are required:

Remove "renderAs" attribute
Add a new attribute to the page tag: "ContentType":
- For Word: contentType="application/msword"
- For Excel: contentType="application/x-excel"
And finally a little bit of tweaking of your style will take care of the job

Spring 09 Release - A Whole New Force.com or Just a Few New Goodies?

2009-01-16T11:47:00.003-05:00

After attending the Spring 09 Release the other day in hope of seeing at least some of the good ideas making way to force.com platform, features such as inline editing for Visualforce pages, more flexibility with custom of related-lists, flexibility on using the advanced Apex features to create customized reports and dashboards, etc following observations were concluded:

Well not all of them made it! in fact, we can summarized the release merely around some enhancements here and there in the platform.

Some of you would even think that in this economic downturn, one can not expect more than this from IT companies. Should this thought ever cross our minds, I would not rule this factor out as an impact on this release!

Let's have a look and quickly browse through the enhancements of the Spring 09 release:

Force.com Sites Improvements
- Audit Trail:
  Now you can track all the changes made to your sites by different users.
- Sites Robot.txt and Fav Icon:
  With this release you will be able to set a robot.txt for you force.com site which enables you to better control how search engines should index your site's pages. Fav Icon is also a useful way of personalizing the browser in showing an icon next to the title of your website (in tabs) and also in favorites/bookmarks.
- Standard Pages:
  Allows you to bring selected standard pages and expose them to the public via your force.com site (suitable for ideas page, etc).
- Sites Packaging:
  With this feature we can package force.com sites, apex code, etc and install them into other instances.
Force.com Web Service API Improvements
- Improvements in the timeout limits of the callouts:
  This is potentially good when the code takes a longer time to process and bring back the results. Now we can configure it in a way to have extended timeout periods resulting in more run-time stability.
- Also Wider range of WSDL types are supported by Spring 09 release.
Database and Reporting
- Summary Report Data Snapshots:
  Previously data snapshots were available on reports, however, with this release you can use snapshots across large amounts of data, where only the summaries will be stored, as well as create historical views of metrics, KPIs and other summary data.
- Data Grouping Functions:
  This is actually a very useful upgrade, now you can group the entries of a report to better analyze aggregate data.
- Delegated Data Administration:
  This feature allows you to grant permission to non-admin users to report, search, modify, transfer, share, unlock, or approve any record regardless of sharing settings on an object basis.
- Dashboard Finder:
  This enhancement allows you to search through your dashboard items (a real time-saver!).
Force.com IDE
- Apex Code Auto-Complete in Force.com IDE:
  Finally! When you are coding in Eclipse (force.com IDE) auto-complete feature will be available to assist you with writing the code.
User Interface
- Enhanced Page Layout Editor:
  This one is my favorite enhancement, using this feature now you can create much better layouts. You can drag and drop fields and items around, "save as" a layout, leave a spot empty (blank spaces), design the mini-layout, etc.
Services
- Cross-Object Workflow:
  With this feature you can update a field on a parent record within a workflow!
- Access to Email Logs in the Application:
  This report shows you whether your outbound emails were received or bounced back and basically gives you a comprehensive log of your outbound emails.

Force.com Logic
- New Opportunity Save Behavior
  Visit the New Opportunity Save Behavior Salesforce wiki page for more information.
Mobile
- Mobile Web Tabs for iPhone
  You can now create mobile-ready Visualforce Tabs for the iPhone. This enhances the client with a near-limitless method of extension - enabling you create content for the iPhone using the Visualforce user interface framework. The hybrid iPhone client that supports this functionality will be released next month.

Allow Mass Update of your Object Records Even Without Having a Save Button!

2009-01-07T10:35:00.006-05:00

Today we want to explore one of the beauties of the Visualforce technology.
Those who have a history of witting ASP or ASP.NET code will admit that Visualforce has made it all too simple to develop business applications.

Let's say we want to be able to update several records of a certain Object all together providing ability for users to quickly make modifications and save them.

This is particularly useful when the data in nature changes often and it's time consuming to do the updates on a record by record basis.

In this example, I will demonstrate a Visualforce page which has a search box through which user can search Accounts and view a list of records where he or she can modify the information inline and then proceed to the next record without clicking on a save button of some sort!

This is very much as easy of entering data into cells of an excel sheet! The only difference is that the Excel needs you to click on the save button at the end but our Visualforce page won't!

I will use an actionFunction tag to create a javascript function which in turn will trigger a method of my Apex controller class. This way when the value of one the input controls changed I can call that javascript function and boom the change would get posted back to the controller and will be saved.

This the how Visualforce page is like:

<apex:page tabStyle="Account" controller="massAccountUpdateCon">
<apex:sectionHeader title="Accounts Mass Update"></apex:sectionHeader>
<apex:form >
<apex:pageBlock title="" id="pageBlock">
  <!-- This block will show the search textbox and the Search button -->
  <apex:pageBlockButtons location="top">
    <apex:inputText value="{!keywords}" style="height:15px;"></apex:inputText>
    <apex:commandButton value="Search" action="{!ViewData}" id="theButton" rerender="pageBlock" status="status"></apex:commandButton>
  </apex:pageBlockButtons>
  <!-- To show page level messages -->
  <apex:pageMessages ></apex:pageMessages>

  <!-- The below tag will provide a javascript method which when is called in turn will call a controller's method -->
  <apex:actionFunction action="{!UpdateRecords}" name="updateRecords" rerender="pageBlock" status="status"></apex:actionFunction>

  <!-- This table contains columns which have inputfield components -->
  <apex:pageBlockTable value="{!accounts}" var="a" rendered="{!NOT(ISNULL(accounts))}">
     <apex:column>
       <apex:facet name="header">Name</apex:facet>
       <apex:inputField value="{!a.Name}" onchange="updateRecords();"></apex:inputField>
     </apex:column>
     <apex:column >
       <apex:facet name="header">Phone</apex:facet>
       <apex:inputField value="{!a.Phone}" onchange="updateRecords();"></apex:inputField>
     </apex:column>
     <apex:column>
       <apex:facet name="header">Billing City</apex:facet>
       <apex:inputField value="{!a.BillingCity}" onchange="updateRecords();"></apex:inputField>
     </apex:column>
     <apex:column>
       <apex:facet name="header">Billing Country</apex:facet>
       <apex:inputField value="{!a.BillingCountry}" onchange="updateRecords();"></apex:inputField>
     </apex:column>
     <apex:column>
       <apex:facet name="header">Industry</apex:facet>
       <apex:inputField value="{!a.Industry}" onchange="updateRecords();"></apex:inputField>
     </apex:column>
  </apex:pageBlockTable>

</apex:pageBlock>

<!-- The action status to show when the AJAX postback is wroking. -->
<apex:actionStatus id="status" startText="Requesting..."/>
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

Now the Controller, this is where the simplicity of coding can be visibly seen!
As you can see in the Controller's source code, I do not need to write any code to find which column's value was changed! All I need to do is to update my List of Accounts!
Visualforce will take care of all those details!

public class massAccountUpdateCon {

  private List<Account> accounts;

  public List<Account> getAccounts() {
      return accounts;
  }

  public string keywords {
    get;
    set;
  }

  public PageReference ViewData() {
     //dynamically build the query to insertthe filter values
     String query = 'Select id, name, type, ownership, industry, phone, BillingCity, billingCountry FROM account WHERE name LIKE \'' + keywords + '%\'';
   
     accounts = Database.query(query);
                   
     return null;
  }

  public PageReference UpdateRecords() {
    // this simple line of code finds out which column was changed and update the 
    // relevant account record accordingly!
    update accounts;
    return null;
  }
}

Visualforce Component to show Object Record Types

2009-01-02T14:33:00.006-05:00

Happy New Year!

Time definitely flies and I wish you wonderful times in 2009!

Part of our daily job is to make life easier for others by developing new applications in force.com platform. But sometimes it's not bad to spend some time for ourselves to make our own life a little easier, better and smoother.

In this article I will present a Visualforce Component that would list the record types of an Object in the platform.

Imagine, the Account object has two record types in the force.com platform (Record Types are created by the users based on what these objects represent on their business).

Account Record types:

Customer
Partner

In many occasions especially when developing a new wizard you need to first allow the user select what type of record they want to create and then based on that show the correct type of interface to the user.

The solution as to how you can show this to the user is rather simple, but here I actually took the time to create a re-usable component, so you and I won't need to rewrite the code next time!

Here is the Component's Tags:


<apex:component controller="RecordTypeListCon">
<apex:attribute name="sObjectType" description="" type="String" required="true" default="Account" assignTo="{!sObjectType}"></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="value" description="" type="String" required="true"></apex:attribute>
<apex:selectList value="{!value}" size="1">
<apex:selectOptions value="{!items}"></apex:selectOptions>
</apex:selectList>
</apex:component>

The Component has a Controller called "RecordTypeListCon" and is named as "RecordTypeList". It declares two attributes as follow:

sObjectType: values such as "Account", "Contact", generally the name of your object.
value: you can capture the result of user's selection by using the attribute in your Vsualforce Controller.

And here goes the code of the component's Controller:


public class RecordTypeListCon {
private List<SelectOption> items;

// property that reads the value from the Component attribute
public string sObjectType
{
get;
set;
}

public List<SelectOption> getItems() {
 List<SelectOption> items = new List<SelectOption>();

 //default value
 items.add(new SelectOption('','--Select Record Type --'));

 //query force.com database to get the record type of the requested object.
 for(RecordType rt: [select id,name from recordtype where sobjecttype=:sObjectType]) {
      items.add(new SelectOption(rt.id,rt.name));
  }

 return items;
}
}

Once you create this component in your Salesforce instance all you need to do when need to the selectList of your object's record types is to:

<c:RecordTypeList value="{!lookupValue}" sObjectType="Account"></c:RecordTypeList>

Enjoy!

URLFOR function finally explained!

2008-12-23T11:40:00.005-05:00

While developing your Visualforce pages you may need to be able to obtain the URL of certain actions, s-controls or your static resources.

I found it personally a challenge since the documentation for "URLFOR" function is not included in "Visualforce Developer Guide" itself and instead included in the general help area of Salesforce.

Generally you can use the "URLFOR" function for three purposes:

Obtain URL of a s-control
Obtain URL of a static resource
Obtain URL of an object's action

In this article I will demonstrate usages of the three above.

Generally, URLFOR function returns a relative URL for an action, s-control, or a file in a static resource archive in a Visualforce page. Following the syntax of the function:

{!URLFOR(target, id, [inputs], [no override])} Parameters shown in brackets ([]) are optional.

target: You can replace target with a URL or action, s-control or static resource.
id: This is id of the object or resource name (string type) in support of the provided target.
inputs: Any additional URL parameters you need to pass you can use this parameter.
you will to put the URL parameters in brackets and separate them with commas
ex: [param1="value1", param2="value2"]
no override: A Boolean value which defaults to false, it applies to targets for standard Salesforce pages. Replace "no override" with "true" when you want to display a standard Salesforce page regardless of whether you have defined an override for it elsewhere.

Obtaining URL of a s-control:

<!-- Use $SControl global veriable to reference your s-control and pass it to the URLFOR function -->
 <apex:outputLink value="{!URLFOR($SControl.MySControlName)}">Link to my S-Control</apex:outputLink>

Obtaining URL of a Static Resource

<!-- Use $Resource global veriable to reference your resource file -->
<apex:image url="{!URLFOR($Resource.LogoImg)}" width="50" height="50" />

<!-- If your file is in another ZIP file, then pass the path of the file as id to URLFOR -->
<apex:image url="{!URLFOR($Resource.CorpZip, 'images/logo.gif')}" width="50" height="50" />

Obtaining URLs of an Object's Actions:
In order to get URL of the an object's actions you need to know what actions that object supports. Below are some of the common actions most Objects support:

View: Shows the detail page of an object
Edit: Shows the object in Edit mode
Delete: URL for deleting an object
New: URL to create a new record of an object
Tab: URL to the home page of an object

However, each object may support additional actions for example Contact also supports "Clone" action and Case supports "CloseCase" action.


<!-- Use $Action global varialble to access the New action reference -->
<apex:outputLink value="{!URLFOR($Action.Account.New)}">New</apex:outputLink>
<br/>
<!-- View action requires the id parameter, a standard controller can be used to obtain the id -->
<apex:outputLink value="{!URLFOR($Action.Account.view, account.id)}">View</apex:outputLink> 
<br/>
<!-- Edit action requires the id parameter, id is taken from standard controller in this example -->
<apex:outputLink value="{!URLFOR($Action.Account.Edit, account.id)}">Edit</apex:outputLink>  
<br/>
<!-- Delete action requires the id parameter, also a confirm message is added to prevent deleting the record when clicked by mistake -->
<apex:outputLink value="{!URLFOR($Action.Account.delete, account.id)}" onclick="return window.confirm('Are you sure?');">Delete</apex:outputLink> 
<br/>
<!-- From all custom buttons, links, s-controls and visualforce pages you can use the following to get the link of the object's homepage -->
<apex:outputLink value="{!URLFOR($Action.Account.Tab, $ObjectType.Account)}">Home</apex:outputLink>

Modifying the Default Force.com Site Template to Build am Excellent Customer Portal

2008-12-04T11:20:00.011-05:00

Force.com Sites were released on December 2, 2008 (just two days ago) and we are all so excited about this new feature.

Now you can potentially create Customer/Partner portals that are integrated with your CRM readily, this is big advantage plus that with ease of Visualforce's technology and shorter development life-cycles now you can deliver with a much faster pace.

In this article I will demonstrate how fast we can modify our sites' template to customize the looked and feel our customer, partner, etc portals.

With each new site that you create there are a few new Visualforce pages and components added to your box. some of those are:

User Management Pages:

SiteLogin
SiteRegister
SiteRegisterConfirm
ForgotPassword
ForgotPasswordConfirm
Unauthorized

Template:

SiteTemplate

Components:

SiteLogin
SiteHeader
SiteFooter

Also a few more pages for handling errors and such.

Now let's take a closer look at the SiteTemplate:


<!-- showHeader is turned off so we won't see any Salesforce standard tabs or sidebar -->
<apex:page showHeader="false" id="SiteTemplate" standardStylesheets="true">
<!-- A section is reserved for header of the site -->
<apex:insert name="header">
<c:SiteHeader />
<hr/>
</apex:insert>
<!-- This section is where you can include the content of each page of your site-->
<apex:insert name="body"/>
<!-- A section is reserved for footer of the site -->
<apex:insert name="footer">
<hr/>
<c:SiteFooter />
</apex:insert>
</apex:page>

Generally it's a good practice that you follow the same pattern in developing your sites.

Furthermore, it's best to include your logo, log in and out links, any headline that remains the same throughout your site and above all your site navigation menu to be included in the "SiteHeader" component.

The same way, you can modify the "SiteFooter" component to add your site's pages footer template. It's good practice to include your site's shortcuts links and your company copy right message in this section.

The shortcuts links in this section particularly is good for search engine purpose, in any case you may be using dynamic (javascript enabled) menus, so this part will compensate for that.

Now let's see how we can benefits from all this. At this point you can start adding pages into your site. For your new pages to be able to utilize your template you need to do the following:


<apex:page showHeader="false" standardStylesheets="true">
<apex:composition template="{!$Site.Template}">
<apex:define name="body">
<!-- Page's Content go here -->
</apex:define>
</apex:composition>
</apex:page>

The above code, the Composite component enables the page to use our site template.

Also if you need to overwrite the existing template's section (Insert Component), you will need to add a "apex:define" component with the same name attribute as the "insert" component in the template.

So in order to overwrite the "body" section of the template, you will need write this line:

<apex:define name="body">
... You page's body...
<apex:define>

And one more thing, in order to be able to use your Static Resources in your force.com Sites, you are required to set the Cache mode of those resources to public. By default all them are in private mode.

Click here to see a usage sample of such template in action:
http://zagrus-developer-edition.na5.force.com/Customer

Adding Sorting Capability to PageBlockTable Component

2008-11-12T11:46:00.005-05:00

In one of my previous posts I demonstrated how to add paging feature to your Visualforce Pages, in this article we will explore how we can add sorting option to the PageBlockTable component.

Challenges:

How to replace standard header text with a link that calls a controller method for sorting the data
How to implement the link in such a way to support sort direction Ascending and Descending features
How to view Ascending and Descending state of the columns

And this is one way of meeting the above challenges:
I first replace the standard header of the Column tag with a facet tag to include a commandLink component in it.

Then I select the column name to be pasted as parameter to the controller once the commandLink header is clicked on.

Then I add some condition to the Label of header to show "Ascending" and "Descending" icons.


<apex:page controller="PageBlockTableSortingCon" tabStyle="Account">
<apex:sectionHeader title="Accounts List with Sorting"></apex:sectionHeader>
<apex:form >
<apex:pageBlock title="" id="pageBlock">
    <apex:pageBlockButtons location="top">
      <apex:commandButton value="View" action="{!ViewData}" id="theButton" rerender="pageBlock"></apex:commandButton>
    </apex:pageBlockButtons>
    <apex:pageMessages ></apex:pageMessages>
    <apex:pageBlockTable value="{!accounts}" var="a" rendered="{!NOT(ISNULL(accounts))}">
       <apex:column>
         <apex:facet name="header">   
           <apex:commandLink action="{!ViewData}" value="Account Name{!IF(sortExpression=='name',IF(sortDirection='ASC','▼','▲'),'')}" id="cmdSort">
             <apex:param value="name" name="column" assignTo="{!sortExpression}" ></apex:param>
           </apex:commandLink>
         </apex:facet>
         <apex:outputLink value="/{!a.Id}" target="_blank">{!a.Name}</apex:outputLink>
       </apex:column>
       <apex:column value="{!a.Phone}">
         <apex:facet name="header">
           <apex:commandLink action="{!ViewData}" value="Phone{!IF(sortExpression=='Phone',IF(sortDirection='ASC','▼','▲'),'')}">
             <apex:param value="Phone" name="column" assignTo="{!sortExpression}" ></apex:param>
           </apex:commandLink>
         </apex:facet>
       </apex:column>
        <apex:column value="{!a.BillingCity}">
          <apex:facet name="header">
           <apex:commandLink action="{!ViewData}" value="Billing City{!IF(sortExpression=='BillingCity',IF(sortDirection='ASC','▼','▲'),'')}">
             <apex:param value="BillingCity" name="column" assignTo="{!sortExpression}" ></apex:param>
           </apex:commandLink>
         </apex:facet>
       </apex:column>
        <apex:column value="{!a.BillingCountry}">
          <apex:facet name="header">
           <apex:commandLink action="{!ViewData}" value="Billing Country{!IF(sortExpression=='BillingCountry',IF(sortDirection='ASC','▼','▲'),'')}">
             <apex:param value="BillingCountry" name="column" assignTo="{!sortExpression}" ></apex:param>
           </apex:commandLink>
         </apex:facet>
       </apex:column>
     
    </apex:pageBlockTable>
</apex:pageBlock>
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

And this how the controller look like:


public class PageBlockTableSortingCon {
 
   private List<Account> accounts;
   private String sortDirection = 'ASC';
   private String sortExp = 'name';

   public String sortExpression
   {
     get
     {
        return sortExp;
     }
     set
     {
       //if the column is clicked on then switch between Ascending and Descending modes
       if (value == sortExp)
         sortDirection = (sortDirection == 'ASC')? 'DESC' : 'ASC';
       else
         sortDirection = 'ASC';
       sortExp = value;
     }
   }

 public String getSortDirection()
 {
    //if not column is selected 
    if (sortExpression == null || sortExpression == '')
      return 'ASC';
    else
     return sortDirection;
 }

 public void setSortDirection(String value)
 {  
   sortDirection = value;
 }
  
   public List<Account> getAccounts() {
       return accounts;
   }


   public PageReference ViewData() {
       //build the full sort expression
       string sortFullExp = sortExpression  + ' ' + sortDirection;
      
       //query the database based on the sort expression
       accounts = Database.query('Select id, Name, BillingCity, BillingCountry, Phone from Account order by ' + sortFullExp + ' limit 1000');
       return null;
   }

}

A Utility Apex Class to Convert All Types Into String

2008-11-07T11:18:00.004-05:00

If you have been in the programming world long enough, you already know that casting types from one to another specially string representation of the variables is always part the job.

Whether you want to show the data to user or form the variables in different formats, incorporate them in messages, etc.

In this article I will present you one of the Apex classes I have written to help me faster develop Salesforce Applications.

This class helps me in number of ways, for example I do not need to worry about the underlying Apex code to convert a primitive type to string anymore, for all types I just need to call one method "ToString" and it will take care of for me.
Also the methods provide me with formatting capabilities, so I can not only convert to string but also format the string in many ways I need.

Look at the below code and see how the results are:


ApexPages.addmessage(new ApexPages.message(ApexPages.severity.INFO,'Integer: '+ zConvert.ToString(13434)));
 ApexPages.addmessage(new ApexPages.message(ApexPages.severity.INFO,'Double: '+ zConvert.ToString(1.23)));
 ApexPages.addmessage(new ApexPages.message(ApexPages.severity.INFO,'Boolean: '+ zConvert.ToString(true)));
 ApexPages.addmessage(new ApexPages.message(ApexPages.severity.INFO,'Date: ' + zConvert.ToString(date.newinstance(1960, 2, 17))));
 ApexPages.addmessage(new ApexPages.message(ApexPages.severity.INFO,'Date time: ' + zConvert.ToString(Datetime.now(),'MMM, dd yyyy')));
 ApexPages.addmessage(new ApexPages.message(ApexPages.severity.INFO,'File Size: '+ zConvert.FileSizeToString(6766767)));
 ApexPages.addmessage(new ApexPages.message(ApexPages.severity.INFO,'Money: '+ zConvert.CurrencyToString(Decimal.valueOf(34.99),'$'))

This is the result of running the above code:

Well, very nice, now let's see how the actual class is developed:
Because I would like to directly call my Coverter's class methods without creating a new instance of the class, I have defined all the methods as "static".

The methods for this class are:

ToString(Integer)
ToString(Double)
ToString(Long)
ToString(Boolean)
ToString(Date)
ToString(Date,format)
sample: zConvert.ToStrong(mydate,'MM-dd-yy')
ToString(Time)
ToString(Time,format)
sample: zConvert.ToStrong(myTime,'hh:mm:ss')
ToString(Datetime)
ToString(Datetime,format)
ToString(Decimal)
ToString(Decimal, ScientificNotaion)
ScientificNotaion is a Boolean value and if false is passed then the string will not have scientific notations.
FileSizeToString(Long)
Returns values such as "5.5 KB", "8 MB", etc. Parameter passed is in bytes.
CurrencyToString(Decimal, CurrencyChar)
CurrencyChar can be "$", "£", etc


public class zConvert
{
 /* The Initial Developer of the Original Code is Sam Arjmandi.
 * Portions created by the Initial Developer are Copyright (C) 2008
 * the Initial Developer. All Rights Reserved. 
 * 
 * This Code is provided "As Is" without warranty of any kind.
 */
 
  public static String ToString(integer Value)
  {
      /* string representation if an Integer value */
      return Value.format();
  }
 
  public static String ToString(Double Value)
  {
    /* string representation if a Double value */
     return Value.format();
  }
 
  public static String ToString(Boolean Value)
  {
     /* string representation if a Boolean value */
     if (Value)
       return 'true';
     else
       return 'false';
  }
 
  public static String ToString(Long Value)
  {
    /* string representation if a Long value */
    return Value.format();
  }
 
  public static String ToString(Date Value)
  {
     /* string representation if a Date value */
     return Value.format();
  }
 
  public static String ToString(Date Value,String format)
  {
    /* string representation if a Date value with formatting */
    Datetime temp = Datetime.newInstance(Value.year(), Value.month(), Value.day());
    return temp.format(format);
  }
 
  public static String ToString(Datetime Value)
  {
     /* string representation if a Datetime value */
     return Value.format();
  }
 
  public static String ToString(Datetime Value,String format)
  {
     /* string representation if a Datetime value with formatting */
     return Value.format(format);
  }
 
  public static String ToString(Time Value)
  {
    /* string representation if a Time value */
    return String.valueOf(Value);
  }
 
  public static String ToString(Time Value, String format)
  {
    /* string representation if a Time value with formating */
    Datetime temp = Datetime.newInstance(1970, 1, 1, Value.hour(), Value.minute(), Value.second());
    return temp.format(format);
  }

  public static String ToString(Decimal Value)
  {
    /* string representation if a Decimal value */
    return Value.format();
  }
 
  public static String ToString(Decimal Value, Boolean ScientificNotation)
  {
    /* string representation if a Decimal value with or without Scientific Notation */
    if (ScientificNotation)
     return Value.format();
    else
     return Value.toPlainString();
  }
 
  public static String FileSizeToString(Long Value)
  {
     /* string representation if a file's size, such as 2 KB, 4.1 MB, etc */
     if (Value < 1024)
       return ToString(Value) + ' Bytes';
     else
     if (Value >= 1024 && Value < (1024*1024))
     {
       //KB
       Decimal kb = Decimal.valueOf(Value);
       kb = kb.divide(1024,2);
       return ToString(kb) + ' KB';
     }
     else
     if (Value >= (1024*1024) && Value < (1024*1024*1024))
     {
       //MB
       Decimal mb = Decimal.valueOf(Value);
       mb = mb.divide((1024*1024),2);
       return ToString(mb) + ' MB';
     }
     else
     {
       //GB
       Decimal gb = Decimal.valueOf(Value);
       gb = gb.divide((1024*1024*1024),2);
      
       return ToString(gb) + ' GB';
     }
    
  }
 
  public static String CurrencyToString(Decimal Value, String CurrencyChar)
  {
     return CurrencyChar + ToString(Value);
  }
 
}

How to Easily Bring Graphical Charts into your CRM?

2008-10-28T11:30:00.008-04:00

There is no doubt that nothing communicates better and faster than graphics with users. It has been always the case that users fail to utilize software solutions merely because the information is not delivered to them intuitively, comprehensively and graphically.

Managers often require summarized business critical information quick and easy to grasp. Utilizing charts in Web Applications has been a challenge for many of us over the past two decade and now it is all much easier than ever!

Google Chart is an excellent tool available for free! It is actually very easy to work with and practical.

In this article I will demonstrate how you can utilize this outstanding component to bring new life to your Salesforce pages!

Example: I have a requirement to create a Visualforce page to view a pie chart that shows number of Accounts in our organization divided by their Types.

Here is how it works:
The Google Chart API requires me to pass the chart information via URL parameters and then in return Google will send me an image in PNG format. Then all I need to do is to view the image using the HTML img tag!

Ingredients:
Chart Server URL: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart
Parameters List:

chs: is in fact the chart size in pixels ex: 300x200
chd: you will need to pass the chart data using this parameter. ex: t:60,40
cht: chart type, ex: p3
chl: chart items' label, ex: Data 1|Data 2

The above are all basic required parameters in order to create charts. So there is more to it if you are interested.

So in order to utilize this component I create a Visualforce page as follows:


<apex:page controller="googleChartCon" tabStyle="Account">
<apex:sectionHeader title="Accounts by Type"></apex:sectionHeader>
<apex:image url="{!chartData}"></apex:image>
</apex:page>

This page only contains an apex:image component which talks to the controller to obtain it's image URL.

The URL is where the magic happens so we will need to focus on that.

In order to do this I first need to get a list of Account's "Type" picklist values and then
in my custom controller, I create an internal Apex class to save the chart's data while I am running through Account's records and find out how many of which type we have in our database.


public class googleChartCon {
private String chartData;

public String getChartData()inter
{
 return chartData;
}

public googleChartCon()
{
 //obtain a list of picklist values
 Schema.DescribeFieldResult F = Account.Type.getDescribe();
 List<Schema.PicklistEntry> P = F.getPicklistValues();
 //where chart data should be stored.
 List<ChartDataItem> items = new List<ChartDataItem>();

 //iterate through each picklist value and get number of accounts
 // I wish we could do GROUP BY in SOQL!
 for(Schema.PicklistEntry pValue : P)
 {
    integer Count = [select count() from Account where Type = :pValue.getValue() limit 10000];
    if (Count > 0)
      items.add(new ChartDataItem(pValue.getValue()+ '-['+ Count.format() + ']' , Count.format()));
 }

 //Prepare the chart URL
 String chartPath = 'http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=600x200&cht=p3';
 chartData = chartPath +  getChartData(items);
}

private String getChartData(List<ChartDataItem> items)
{
 String chd = ''; //23,34,56
 String chl = ''; //Hello|World

 for(ChartDataItem citem : items)
 {
    chd += citem.ItemValue + ',';
    chl += citem.Label + '|';
 }
 //remove the last comma or pipe
 chd = chd.substring(0, chd.length() -1);
 chl = chl.substring(0, chl.length() -1);

 String result = '&chd=t:' + chd + '&chl=' + chl;
 return result;
}

public class ChartDataItem
{
 public String ItemValue
 {
  get;
  set;
 }

 public String Label
 {
   get;
   set;
 }

 public ChartDataItem(String Label, String Value)
 {
    this.Label = Label;
    this.ItemValue = Value;
 }


}

}

For some security might be a concern sending the data via URL parameters.
Up to this point, I have not been able to confirm if Google is officially supporting SSL connections to rectify this problem. However the following seems to be fine:

https://www.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World

In this article I have barely scratched the surface of Google Charts API, if you are interested to learn more about it go to http://code.google.com/apis/chart/

Working With Multiselect Picklists

2008-10-23T20:50:00.007-04:00

Working with Picklists essentially is rewarded since it limits the options of the user and standards what is valid as a value for a field in the system. As good as they are however they bring their own complexity with them.

This is especially true when you are working with multi-select Picklists. Mostly Visualforce’s inputField is used to view multi-select Picklists as Salesforce team is working on it to be more effective and error-free.

In this article we will see how to use the multi-select Picklists.

First off, let’s see how we can load values into our Picklist and view it on our Visualforce page.
Let’s say I have a custom multi-select Picklist field on my User object to define sales regions my users operate on.

The picklist has values such as:

North America
Latin America
Europe
Asia
Middle East
Africa

and so on

In my controller class I add the following property:


public class multiselectPicklist {
 private User salesRegions;

 public multiselectPicklist()
 {
    salesRegions = new User();
 }
 public User getSalesRegions() {
      return salesRegions;
 }
 public void setSalesRegions(User Value) {
      salesRegions = Value;
 }
}

As you can see it is enough to create a new User object and later on use the picklist field to show the values on your page. Unfortunately there is no other way through which you would more control over what values are shown on your multi-select control. May be in future Salesforce will supply a Component for multi-select operations.

Please note that I have created a setter property as well that receives a User object. This setter allows us to later on read the selected values by user.

Now that we have our controller ready we can program our page to view our multi-select picklist.
in this example what I am trying to achieve is that to allow the user choose as many regions as he/she wants and them filter the Users of the system and view only those who are assigned to those regions.


<apex:page controller="multiselectPicklist" tabStyle="User" sideBar="false">
<apex:form >
   <apex:sectionHeader title="Users by Region Report"></apex:sectionHeader>
 
   <apex:pageBlock id="pageBlock" title="Search Filter">
    <apex:pageMessages ></apex:pageMessages>
    <apex:pageBlockSection title="Filters" columns="2" collapsible="true">
       <apex:inputField id="salesRegions" value="{!salesRegions.Sales_Regions__c}" ></apex:inputField>
    </apex:pageBlockSection>
   </apex:pageBlock>
   <apex:pageBlock id="searchResults" title="Results">
     <apex:pageBlockButtons >
        <apex:commandButton value="Run Report" action="{!runReport}" status="status" rerender="searchResults"></apex:commandButton>
     </apex:pageBlockButtons>
     <apex:pageMessages ></apex:pageMessages>
     <apex:pageBlockTable value="{!users}" var="u" rendered="{!NOT(ISNULL(users))}" rules="cols">
        <apex:column value="{!u.UserName}"></apex:column>
        <apex:column value="{!u.IsActive}"/>
     </apex:pageBlockTable>
  </apex:pageBlock>
</apex:form>
</apex:Page>

Something that you should bear in mind is that even though multi-select option suggests that you should be dealing with a list of Strings as a result of user’s interaction with your control on the page all you will receive will just a semicolon separated string. It is your job to separate the values and use then in whatever endeavor you intend to have.

Below on my button action I have demonstrated how you can read the selected values back and use them in your query to get a list of users in those sales regions:



 public PageReference runReport() {

    if (salesRegions.Sales_Regions__c == null || salesRegions.Sales_Regions__c == '') {
      apexPages.addmessage(new ApexPages.message(ApexPages.severity.INFO, 'Please select one or more regions first.'));
      return null;
    }
    // read the values into an array
    string[] regions = salesRegions.Sales_Regions__c.split(';',0);
    if (regions != null && regions.size() > 0)
    {
       //query the database based on the user's selection
       users = [select Username, IsActive, Id from user where Sales_Regions__c in :regions and IsActive = true order by Username];
    }
  
      return null;
  }

 private List<User> users;
 
 public List<User> getUsers()
 {
    return users;
 }
}

Something funny that occurred to me was that I tried to hook the Multi-select Component (inputField) with actionSupport to capture onChange event and load values of another Picklist item on my project which was totally a disappointment! It seems that the Salesforce team has been able to get that one to work yet.

How to Create Custom Related-List on Visualforce Pages

2008-10-22T21:43:00.008-04:00

In the past few weeks in many cases I came across the requirement to add a custom list to the Object's detail page.

The list should be just like related-lists such as "Open Activities" or "Google Docs, Notes, & Attachments", however it is suppose to view a list of data which is somehow relevant to the object but not necessarily from an object directly related to the current object's page.

Let's consider this example, imagine we need to view a list of opportunities related to a Contact through it's Account relationship (not the ones that are directly linked to the Contact).

This is to say that if Contact A is linked to Account X and Account X has 5 opportunities linked to it, by viewing Contact A's details we would be able to view those opportunities as well.

Ok, now action, in order to do this we will need to create a new Visualforce Page and Controller extension.

So I add this text in front of http://yourOrg.salesforce.com/apex/SampleDetailPage and create the new page instantly (This is only possible when you profile is set to work in developer mode).

I set the page's Controller attribute to "Contact" and call my extension "SampleDetailPageCon".
On the page all I need to do is to show the existing Contact details based on whatever active layout target user has chosen and then add my related-list to the bottom of the page. The page code goes like this:

<apex:page standardController="Contact" extensions="sampleDetailPageCon">
<style>
.fewerMore { display: none;}
</style>
<apex:form >
 <apex:pageMessages />
 <apex:detail relatedList="true"></apex:detail>
<apex:pageblock id="CustomList" title="Related Opportunities"  >
   <apex:pageBlockTable value="{!oppz}" var="o" rendered="{!NOT(ISNULL(oppz))}">
        <apex:column value="{!o.Name}"/>
        <apex:column value="{!o.Account.Name}"/>
        <apex:column value="{!o.Type}"/>
       <apex:column value="{!o.Amount}"></apex:column>
       <apex:column value="{!o.CloseDate}"/>
   </apex:pageBlockTable>
   <apex:outputLabel value="No records to display" rendered="{!(ISNULL(oppz))}" styleClass="noRowsHeader"></apex:outputLabel>
 </apex:pageblock>
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

A few tips, normally at the end of detail page Salesforce publishes a component for viewing a few more or a few less records to adjust the size of the page.

Since our related list will be rendered under this component it might not be a bad idea to get rid of it. If you pay attention to be page's code you will see that a style tag has been added to the page that will just do that.

Apart from this everything else is very straight forward. Now all we need to do is to extend the Contact's standard controller and make it able to generate a list of related Opportunities as well.

Here is the Controller's Code:


public class sampleDetailPageCon {
    private List<Opportunity> oppz;
    private Contact cntact; 
    public sampleDetailPageCon(ApexPages.StandardController controller) {
        this.cntact= (Contact)controller.getRecord();
    }
    public List<Opportunity> getOppz()
    {
        Contact con = [Select id, Account.id FROM Contact where id = :cntact.id];
        if (con.Account == null)
         return null;
        oppz = [Select id, Name, Account.Name, CloseDate, Amount, Type from Opportunity where Account.id = :con.Account.id];
        return oppz;
    }
}

As you can see this also very simple. In the above code, I have just added a method called "getOppz()" in which I first try to see if the Contact is linked to any accounts and if yes then use the Account id to get a list of its Opportunities.

That's it! Now if you need your page to be used by Salesforce as default detail page all you need to do is:

Go to: Setup -> Customize -> Contacts -> Buttons and Links
Click on "override" next to "View" label
Select "Visualforce Page" and then your page from the drop down list

Now there is only one thing left, as you all have noticed every related-list has a hover feature on the top of the page where user can quickly view all the related-lists without scrolling down the whole page.

In my next article I will show you how you can go through the backdoor to add your related-list on the top of the page!

Bringing Google Calendar into Salesforce CRM pages

2008-10-10T14:46:00.009-04:00

Since the very first time I saw Google Calendar' API, I wondered if it can be used for any bizarre or genius applications (having a sense of a-tool-for-public) or not. For example I really liked to be able to load Google Calendar into my page and then using the API add as many events as I desire on it from my own database without any authentication requirement and just for the sake of showing the data to user, but I have not been able to get it work in that order so far.

Yet there are a lot of other benefits that Google Calendar can bring along, in terms of sharing events, publishing, flexibility and integration with other portals/applications in the cloud.

One of things you might find useful is the capability of sharing a Google public calendar with your Salesforce CRM users.

At first I tried to publish my own personal calendar into Salesforce, and I was successful to some extent. I could see the calendar is being shown properly and I can switch between the weekly, monthly, etc views. All nice, but I noticed that the Calendar is empty and my events are missing.

In Google Calendar's documentation is not mentioned that you should use a public calendar to be able to share it in other websites or maybe that goes without saying! So I initially thought that any Calendar could be shared and as long as my event is set as public people should be able to see them.

It was more like one of those scenarios where you show a button on your page to a user but say "Do not click on it, ok my boy?"

Anyway, in order to publish the calendar on your Salesforce CRM, you should first think about where you want to place it and you may require to create a new Visualforce page before copying the calendar HTML code into it.

In order to get the calendar's HTML code go to your Google Calendar page and either create a new Calendar to publish it as public calendar or if you already have one then click on settings (on the left side of the screen).

Once you have your public calendar ready go to its "details" page and look for a spot that says "Embed This Calendar", copy the code and paste it into your Visualforce page. That's all!

<apex:page tabStyle="Campaign">
<apex:form >
</apex:form>
<iframe src="http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=6lectl1l76jrmul8st527rbq6c%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/New_York&color=%23336699;" style="border: 0" width="800" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>
</apex:page>

And you will see something like below in your page:

Utilizing Dynamic Apex Feature in Winter 09 Release!

2008-10-09T14:47:00.009-04:00

Well for some of us yet the developer edition is not supporting the all glorious Salesforce CRM winter 09 features such as Dynamic Apex.

However, those who have been able to get their hands on it already know that this release has opened up a lot of new possibilities for developing Visualforce pages. Even though here and there I still stumble over some glitches or nice-to-haves, I have decided to devote some of my time each day to learning the new stuff and incorporate them into my apps.

In this article we will see how we can build Dynamic SOQL queries, execute them, get exactly the records we want and moreover we will see how we can now easier than ever hook our selectLists to object's picklists.

For this example, consider filtering Account records based on Name, Type, Ownership and also we want the user to choose how many records they want to get back on the screen.

Points:
I have used a PanelGrid to put my filter Components in and PageBlockTable to view the results.
The page is pretty standrad, what Winter 09 features are about in this article are all in the Controller's Code.

<apex:page controller="myPageController" tabStyle="Account">
<apex:form >
<apex:sectionHeader title="Customer Search" />
<apex:PanelGrid columns="2" id="panel" cellpadding="2">

<apex:outputLabel value="Account Name: "></apex:outputLabel>
<apex:inputText id="textbox" value="{!searchText}" size="40" style="height:13px;font-size:11px;"></apex:inputText>

<apex:outputLabel value="Type: "></apex:outputLabel>
<apex:selectList size="1" id="accountType" value="{!accountType}">
<apex:selectOptions value="{!accountTypes}"></apex:selectOptions>
</apex:selectList>

<apex:outputLabel value="Ownership:"></apex:outputLabel>
<apex:selectList size="1" id="accountOwnership" value="{!accountOwnership}">
<apex:selectOptions value="{!accountOwnerships}"></apex:selectOptions>
</apex:selectList>

<apex:outputLabel value="Result:"></apex:outputLabel>
<apex:selectList size="1" id="resultNo" value="{!resultNo}">
<apex:selectOption itemValue="50" itemLabel="50"></apex:selectOption>
<apex:selectOption itemValue="100" itemLabel="100"></apex:selectOption>
<apex:selectOption itemValue="150" itemLabel="150"></apex:selectOption>
</apex:selectList>

<div></div>
<apex:commandButton action="{!search}" value="Search" rerender="pageblock"></apex:commandButton>
</apex:PanelGrid>

</apex:form>
<br/>
<apex:pageblock id="pageblock" >
<apex:messages></apex:messages>
<apex:pageBlockSection title="Results" id="results" columns="1" collapsible="true">
<apex:pageBlockTable value="{!accountResults}" var="a" rendered="{!NOT(ISNULL(accountResults))}">
<apex:column value="{!a.Name}"></apex:column>
<apex:column value="{!a.Type}"></apex:column>
<apex:column value="{!a.Ownership}"></apex:column>
<apex:column value="{!a.Industry}"></apex:column>
</apex:pageBlockTable>
</apex:pageBlockSection>
</apex:pageblock>
</apex:page>

In this Controller I have developed a procedure "getObjPicklistValues" which receives a DescribeFieldResult object as parameter, corresponding to the picklist I want to show in the filter components' area. DescribeFieldResult methods provide you with most reflection capabilities you require to be able to programmatically write reusable codes (as you can see in this example).

The other benefit that previously was not an option in Visualforce is Dynamic Apex. Now you can build your query based on user's choices on the fly, then run it against Salesforce database and view the customized data to the user.

In this example, if the user is not entering any value for Account Name or has not chosen any Account type, then simply those fields will not be queried and will be excluded from the SOQL statement.

And the controller's code:

public class myPageController {

private List accountResults;

public List getAccountResults() {

return accountResults;

}

public String searchText

{

get;

set;

}

public String accountType

{

get;

set;

}

public String accountOwnership

{

get;

set;

}

public String resultNo

{

get;

set;

}

public List getAccountTypes()

{

return getObjPicklistValues(Account.Type.getDescribe());

}

public List getAccountOwnerships()

{

return getObjPicklistValues(Account.Ownership.getDescribe());

}

private List getObjPicklistValues(Schema.DescribeFieldResult picklistDesc)

{

List pList = picklistDesc.getPicklistValues();

List items = new List();

items.add(new SelectOption('','--None--'));

for (Schema.PicklistEntry pl : pList) {

items.add(new SelectOption(pl.getValue(),pl.getLabel()));

}

return items;

}

public PageReference search()

{

String query = 'Select name, type, ownership, industry from account ';

String queryLimit = ' limit ' + resultNo;

String conditions = '';

if (searchText != null && searchText != '')

conditions += ' name LIKE \'' + searchText + '%\'';

if (accountType != null)

{

if (conditions != '') conditions+= ' and ';

conditions += ' Type = \'' + accountType + '\'';

}

if (accountOwnership != null)

{

if (conditions != '') conditions+= ' and ';

conditions += ' Ownership = \'' + accountOwnership + '\'';

}

if (conditions != '')

query += ' where ' + conditions;

query += ' order by CreatedDate DESC ';

query += queryLimit;

//apexPages.addmessage(new ApexPages.message(ApexPages.severity.INFO, query));

accountResults = Database.query(query);

return null;

}

A Picklist Component For Your Visualforce Pages

2008-10-07T23:30:00.006-04:00

The last couple of months, numerous times in order to view picklist values in a form either for filter the views or creating custom data entry forms, I had to come up with ways to get around the limitations and somehow hook the inputField with the picklist to show what I needed.

Now, with the Salesforce Winter 09 improvements now it is much easier to tackle this issue.

In this article we will design an Apex component that gets the picklist name as attribute and renders the picklist values in form of a dropdown list.

This component will be really useful for non-multi-select picklists. I will post another article on multiselect picklists in near future.

Let's see how the Component will be added to the Page:

<c:picklist id="industryPicklist" value="{!accountIndustry}" picklistField="Industry" systemEntity="Account" usedefaultvalue="true"/>

What you need to define for the component is what object, which picklist field of that Object and a property of your page's Controller allowing you to read what user's choice was.

Now let's dive into the code and see how this component is developed. Like most other Visualforce page developments our component has two parts. The User Interface elements and the controller behind it.

<apex:component controller="picklistController">
<apex:attribute name="SystemEntity" description="" type="String" required="true" default="Account" assignTo="{!systemObject}"></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="picklistField" description="" type="String" required="true" default="Type" assignTo="{!picklist_Field}"></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="value" description="" type="String" required="true"></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="defaultLabel" description="default value to be shown to user" type="String" assignTo="{!listDefaultLabel}" default="--None--"></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="defaultValue" description="default value to be shown to user" type="String" assignTo="{!listDefaultValue}" default=""></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="useDefaultValue" description="whether a default value to be shown or not" type="Boolean" assignTo="{!haveDefaultValue}" default="false"></apex:attribute>

<apex:selectList value="{!value}" size="1">
<apex:selectOptions value="{!items}"></apex:selectOptions>
</apex:selectList>
</apex:component>

The Component has only a selectList and a few attributes. Below are a list of attributes used for this component:

systemEntity: API name of the Object which has a picklist field
picklistField: API name of the Object's picklist field
value: This field should be bound to a property in parent Page's Controller
defaultLabel: Label of the default value shown to user, only visible when useDefaultValue is set to true.
defaultValue: Value of the default item shown to user, only visible when useDefaultValue is set to true.
useDefaultValue: A Boolean value tells the component whether to show a default value or not.

Now let's see how the Controller is look like:

public class picklistController {

//System object name, such as Account

private String systemObject;

public String getSystemObject() {

return systemObject;

}

public void setSystemObject(String value)

{

systemObject = value;

}

//picklist name such as "Type" of account object

private String picklist_Field;

public String getPicklist_Field() {

return picklist_Field;

}

public void setPicklist_Field(String value) {

picklist_Field= value;

}

//default item's value

public String listDefaultValue

{

get;

set;

}

//default item's label

public String listDefaultLabel

{

get;

set;

}

// whether the default item should be shown

public Boolean haveDefaultValue

{

get;

set;

}

public List getItems()

{

List entries_local;

if (systemObject != null)

{

//use GlobalDecribe to get a list of all available Objects

Map gd = Schema.getGlobalDescribe();

Set objectKeys = gd.keySet();

for(String objectKey: objectKeys)

{

//Iterate through all objects to locate selected Object

if (objectKey == systemObject.toLowerCase())

{

Schema.SObjectType systemObjectType = gd.get(objectKey);

Schema.DescribeSObjectResult r = systemObjectType.getDescribe();

Map M = r.fields.getMap();

Set fieldNames = M.keySet();

if (picklist_Field == null)

{

break;

}

//iterate through all fields of the object to locate the picklist field

for(String fieldName: fieldNames)

{

if (fieldName == picklist_Field.toLowerCase())

{

Schema.SObjectField field = M.get(fieldName);

Schema.DescribeFieldResult fieldDesc = field.getDescribe();

//extract the picklist values

entries_local = fieldDesc.getPicklistValues();

break;

}

}//end for

}

//Loading the picklist values and default item for our selectList

List options = new List();

//take care of Default value

if (haveDefaultValue == true)

{

if (listDefaultValue == null)

listDefaultValue = '';

if (listDefaultLabel== null)

listDefaultLabel = '--None--';

options.add(new SelectOption(listDefaultValue,listDefaultLabel));

}

//take care of picklist values

if (entries_local != null)

{

for(Schema.PicklistEntry picklistItem : entries_local)

{

options.add(new SelectOption(picklistItem.getValue(),picklistItem.getLabel()));

}

return options;

}

A Visualforce Component that Beautifies actionStatus!

2008-10-02T18:04:00.006-04:00

I have always liked to be able to have one of those fancy AJAX "loading..." messages for my AJAX postback calls. The background screen grays out, all components (textboxes, buttons, etc) become disabled and a little box says "Working on your request..." or "Running..." with that famous GIF animator of a spinning wheel and hey, I finally did it!

In this article I will show how to design the HTML to place the loading message into the center of the screen and gray out the background and the whole nine yards...

In this example I will first create a Visualforce component so that potentially I could use my beautiful "loading..." message on every page I desire, furthermore by forming it as a Component I can parameterize the look and feel of it and easily deploy it into different pages with different coloring styles.

In order to create a new Component click on the "setup" link on the right top corner of the page and find "Develop" item on the left hand-side and expand it, and click on "Components". Alternatively you can browse:
http://yourinstance.salesforce.ccom/apexcomponent/{YourComponentName}

Below you will be to get the code that goes into the component. The HTML code includes two Div elements, one for the gray background and the other for the actual box that the message is shown in and a javascript peice that adjusts the sizes of the div element based on the client browser's resolution and avialable place.

<apex:component >

<apex:attribute name="BorderColor" type="String" required="true" description=""></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="Width" type="String" required="true" description=""></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="Height" type="String" required="true" description=""></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="BackColor" type="String" required="true" description=""></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="BackColor" type="String" required="true" description=""></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="BorderSize" type="String" required="true" description=""></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="ImageUrl" type="String" required="false" description=""></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="Message" type="String" required="false" description=""></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="messageStyle" type="String" required="false" description="Message inline style"></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="BorderStyle" type="String" required="false" description="Message box border style: solid, outset, inset, etc"></apex:attribute>

<div id="salesforceSource_blurybackground" style="position:absolute; left:1px; top:1px; width:100%; height:100%; text-align:center; vertical-align: middle; background-color: #dcdcdc; opacity:0.6;filter:alpha(opacity=60)">
</div>
<div id="salesFroceSource_StatusBox" style="position:absolute; left:100px; top: 100px;width: {!Width}; height:{!Height}; opacity:1;filter:alpha(opacity=100)">
<table border="{!BorderSize}" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-left-color: {!BorderColor};
border-bottom-color: {!BorderColor}; width: {!Width}; border-top-color: {!BorderColor}; height:{!Height};
border-right-color:{!BorderColor}; border-style:{!BorderStyle}; background-color:{!BackColor};">
<tr>
<td align="left" valign="top">
<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" style="width: 100%; height: 100%">
<tr>
<td style="border-bottom-color:{!BorderColor}; border-bottom-width:1px; border-bottom-style:solid;vertical-align:middle;">
<img src="{!ImageUrl}"/></td>
<td style="border-bottom-color:{!BorderColor}; border-bottom-width:1px; border-bottom-style:solid;vertical-align:middle;{!messageStyle}">
 {!Message}</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
var AgreementForm = document.getElementById("salesforceSource_blurybackground");
AgreementForm.style.height = window.screen.availHeight + "px";
AgreementForm.style.width = window.screen.availWidth + "px";

var ContainerElem = document.getElementById("salesFroceSource_StatusBox");
//ContainerElem.style.display = "block";
AlignToCenter(ContainerElem);

function AlignToCenter(Element)
{
var availableHeight = 0;
var availableWidth = 0;
if (Element.ownerDocument)
{
var docElement = Element.ownerDocument.documentElement;
availableHeight = parseInt(docElement.clientHeight);
if (availableHeight == "NaN") availableHeight = 0;

availableWidth = parseInt(docElement.clientWidth);
if (availableWidth == "NaN") availableWidth = 0;
}

if (availableHeight == 0 || availableHeight == "NaN")
availableHeight = window.screen.availHeight - 200;
if (availableWidth == 0 || availableWidth == "NaN")
availableWidth = window.screen.availWidth - 100;

var msgBoxTop = parseInt((availableHeight - parseInt(Element.clientHeight))/2);
var msgBoxleft = parseInt((availableWidth - parseInt(Element.style.width))/2);

if (msgBoxTop == "NaN" || msgBoxTop == 0)
msgBoxTop = 100;

Element.style.left = msgBoxleft + "px";
Element.style.top = msgBoxTop + "px";
}
</script>
</apex:component>

Pay a good attention to the Attribute section of the of the component those lines will empower you to change the look of the component entirely!

Ok, Now let's see how we can use this component. In Force.com in order to call your component you will need to call it a prefix tag called "c" and don't ask why because that's the way it is.

<apex:actionStatus id="status">
<apex:facet name="start">
<c:enhancedActionStatus BackColor="#efefef" borderColor="#336699" borderSize="3" height="50px" width="120px" ImageUrl="{!$Resource.AjaxAnimation}" Message="Loading..." messageStyle="color:darkred;font-size:11pt;font-weight:bold;"/>
</apex:facet>
</apex:actionStatus>

How To Mass Update All Your Object's Data?

2008-10-01T21:02:00.010-04:00

We know all too well that in many cases organizations have way above 8000 Account records after couple of years of using Salesforce CRM and this number in even higher when we talk about Contacts, Opportunities, Tasks, etc.

Many Salesforce partners have provided solutions to mass update/insert data into your objects, but more often you are required to examine data and make sure about its integrity and soundness.

Limitations:
Based on governing limitation provided by force.com platform:

You can only retrieve 1000 records at a time
You can only update/insert/delete 100 records at a time

Luckily, there is something that you can do about this on your own. By doing a little bit more extra programming, use of visualforce components and apex Triggers you can overcome this problem.

The solution won't be as fast, but it will work!

Let's explore our example here: Let's say we need to check all of our Account records and make sure Parent child relationship between our Accounts are correctly in place.

In order to enforce that let's say we have added Dun & Bradstreet ID and Parent Dun & Bradstreet ID numbers as custom fields to our Account object.

Therefore, if the D&B Parent ID has a value but the Parent Account field is empty we have a broken link. I should point out here that the above is just an example, however you may have any type of logic to validate individual objects records, checking Accounts agaist Opportunities, Quotes against Invoices, etc.

Here is the idea, I have over 12,000 records to process and this is well above the governing limits. So if I could divide the task into smaller number of records and process each at a time then I could iterate through the records and fix them one by one without hitting into any limits.

So, I added an integer flag custom field to Account object to mark those I fix and move on through the further records in the next iterations.

I employ an actionPoller that runs every 10 seconds that triggers my operation of processing my Account records in batches of 50. The actionPoller is deactivate in the begining and can become activated via a button "Start". The same button will be able stop the process.

I follow this logic, at first I select the first 50 accounts which do not have parent but do have Parent D&B number and I will try to locate the Account Id of the parent via "Parent D&B number" if not sucessful I mark the Account Heirarchy status as "Broken Link" (for reporting purposes), if the parent was not found I mark the Account Heirarchy Status as "Parent Missing" and if everything was ok then I link up the Account to its parent.

Here the how the page code looks like:

<apex:page controller="AccountHierarchyBuilderCon" tabStyle="Account">
<apex:sectionHeader title="Account Hierarchy Builder"></apex:sectionHeader>
<apex:form >
<apex:pageBlock title="{!StatusText}" id="pageBlock">
<apex:pageBlockButtons >
<apex:commandButton value="{!buttonCaption}" action="{!TaggleActionPoller}" id="theButton"></apex:commandButton>
<apex:commandButton value="Launch Reports" action="{!LaunchReports}" id="ButtonReports" disabled="{!actionPollerEnabled}"></apex:commandButton>
<apex:commandButton value="Clean up" action="{!UpdateAccounts}" id="secButton" disabled="{!actionPollerEnabled}" onclick="return window.confirm('Removing status values will prepare this tool to re-examine invalid hierarchies. Are you sure about this?');"></apex:commandButton>
<apex:commandButton value="Clean up All" action="{!UpdateAccountsAll}" id="CleanAllButton" disabled="{!actionPollerEnabled}" onclick="return window.confirm('Removing all status values will prepare this tool to start over. Are you sure about this?');"></apex:commandButton>
</apex:pageBlockButtons>
<apex:actionPoller enabled="{!actionPollerEnabled}" interval="10" action="{!RunBatch}" rerender="pageBlock" status="status"></apex:actionPoller>
<apex:actionStatus id="status" startText="Working on the next batch..."></apex:actionStatus>
<br/>
<apex:pageBlockSection columns="1" id="resultsBlock">
<apex:pageMessages />
<div style="background-color:white;display:{!IF(invalidAccountSize=0,'none','block')};"> List of Invalid Accounts:</div>
<apex:pageBlockTable value="{!invalidAccounts}" var="a" title="Current Invalid Records" rendered="{!NOT(invalidAccountSize=0)}">
<apex:column value="{!a.Id}" ></apex:column>
<apex:column value="{!a.Name}" ></apex:column>
<apex:column value="{!a.parent_D_B_number__c}"></apex:column>
<apex:column value="{!a.Hierarchy_Status__c}"></apex:column>
</apex:pageBlockTable>
</apex:pageBlockSection>

</apex:pageBlock>
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

As you observed in the code, I have added a pageBlockTable component to show the invalid Accounts (Broken Links or missing parents) to the user between the intervals.

Here is the controller's code:

public class AccountHierarchyBuilderCon {
private Boolean pisWorking;
private Boolean pActionPollerEnabled;
private Integer ptotalRecords;
private Integer ptotalProcessed;
private List InvalidAccounts;
private String pbuttonCaption;
private Integer pTotalModified;
private Boolean pIsTesting = false;

public AccountHierarchyBuilderCon()
{
InvalidAccounts = new List();
pisWorking = false;
pbuttonCaption = 'Start';
pActionPollerEnabled = false;
ptotalProcessed = 0;
pTotalModified = 0;
ptotalRecords = -1;
}

public Boolean getIsTesting()
{
return pIsTesting;
}
public void setIsTesting(Boolean Value)
{
pIsTesting = Value;
}

public boolean getIsWorking()
{
return pisWorking;
}

public String getTotalRecords()
{
if (ptotalRecords == -1)
{
if (pIsTesting == true)
ptotalRecords = 10000;
else
ptotalRecords = [select count() from Account WHERE (Hierarchy_Status__c = '' OR Hierarchy_Status__c = null) AND (parent_D_B_number__c != null) limit 10000];
}

if (ptotalRecords == 10000)
return '10,000 or more';
else
return ptotalRecords+ '';
}

public Integer getTotalProcessed()
{
return ptotalProcessed;
}

public Boolean getActionPollerEnabled()
{
return pActionPollerEnabled;
}
public void setActionPollerEnabled(Boolean Value)
{
pActionPollerEnabled = Value;
}

public String getStatusText()
{
return ptotalProcessed + ' Account(s) out of ' + getTotalRecords() + ' are processed.';
}

public String getButtonCaption()
{
return pbuttonCaption;
}

public Integer getActionPollerInterval()
{
return 10;
}

public List getInvalidAccounts()
{
return InvalidAccounts;
}

public Integer getInvalidAccountSize()
{
return InvalidAccounts.size();
}

public PageReference TaggleActionPoller()
{
if (pActionPollerEnabled)
{
pActionPollerEnabled = false;
pbuttonCaption = 'Start';
}
else
{
pActionPollerEnabled = true;
pbuttonCaption = 'Stop';
}
return null;
}

public PageReference RunBatch()
{
if (pisWorking)
return null;
else
{
pisWorking = true;
}

try
{
UpdateAllAccounts();
}
catch(Exception ex)
{
ApexPages.addMessage(new ApexPages.Message(ApexPages.severity.FATAL,ex.getMessage()));
TaggleActionPoller();
}

//end of the procedure
pisWorking = false;
return null;
}

public PageReference UpdateAllAccounts()
{
Integer sucessCount = 0;
InvalidAccounts = new List();
List Accounts = [select id, Name, parent_D_B_number__c, ParentId, Hierarchy_Status__c from Account WHERE (Hierarchy_Status__c = '' OR Hierarchy_Status__c = null) AND (parent_D_B_number__c != null) limit 50];

for(Account a : Accounts)
{
String ParentDBNo = (a.parent_D_B_number__c == null a.parent_D_B_number__c == '')? 'dummy_unknown' : a.parent_D_B_number__c;

List parents = null;
try
{
parents = [Select id, Name From Account where (D_B_Number__c = :ParentDBNo AND id != :a.id)];
}
catch(Exception e)
{}

Account parent = null;
if (parents == null parents.size() <= 0) { a.Hierarchy_Status__c = 'Broken Link'; InvalidAccounts.add(a); } else if (Parents.size() > 1)
{
a.Hierarchy_Status__c = 'Duplicated Parent';
InvalidAccounts.add(a);
}
else
{
parent = parents[0];
}

if (parent != null && parent.id != a.id)
{
a.ParentId = parent.id;
a.Hierarchy_Status__c = 'Updated';

sucessCount++;
}

try
{
update a;
}
catch(Exception ex)
{
a.Hierarchy_Status__c = 'Update Failed';
try
{
a.ParentId = null;
update a;
}
catch(Exception ex2)
{
//do nothing
}

InvalidAccounts.add(a);
}

ptotalProcessed += 1;
}//end for

String msg = '';

if (Accounts.size() == 0)
{
msg = 'All Records are up to date.';
TaggleActionPoller();
}
else
{
msg = ' A total of ' + sucessCount + ' Account(s) updated and ' + InvalidAccounts.size() + ' failed to get updated. This list will updated in '+ getActionPollerInterval() + ' seconds.';
}
ApexPages.addMessage(new ApexPages.Message(ApexPages.severity.INFO, msg));

return null;

}

public PageReference UpdateAccounts()
{
//updates only invalid ones
updateAccountHierarchy('Updated','');
return null;
}

public PageReference UpdateAccountsAll() {
//updates all accounts
updateAccountHierarchy('','');
return null;
}

private void updateAccountHierarchy(String Find, String updateTo)
{
if (pIsTesting == true)
{
//do nothing. We are testing!
}
else
{
//this code cleans up all accounts Hierarchy_Status__c
for(Account[] accs : [Select id, Hierarchy_Status__c from Account where Hierarchy_Status__c != :Find limit 10000])
{
for(Account a : accs)
{
a.Hierarchy_Status__c = updateTo;
}

update accs;
}

Integer Count = [Select count() from Account where Hierarchy_Status__c != :Find limit 10000];
if (count > 0)
updateAccountHierarchy(Find,updateTo);

}
}

public PageReference LaunchReports()
{
PageReference ref = new PageReference('/apex/AccountHierarchyReports');
ref.setRedirect(true);

return ref;
}

}

The controller also forwards the user to another visualforce page which user will be able to see the report (all invalid accounts). This is something that you can implement easily on you own.

Now the last touch-ups. Our page iterates through all Accounts and mark them once and for all. Therefore, we will face two problems:

What if we wanted to re-run the process?
This can be taken care of if you write a method to remove the flags from all or some of the records based on what makes sense to you.
What if I fixed one of the invalid Accounts, how the can the system know or the flag to be set to OK?
The answer is a Trigger on the Account object.

trigger HierarchyStatusReferesh on Account (before update) {
// this trigger removes the previous value of "Hierarchy_Status__c" field
// if the account's parent_duns_number__c or Ultimate_Parent_D_B_Number__c are changed.
// this trigger work in conjunction with Account Hierarchy Builder tool.

Map entries = new Map(Trigger.old);

for(Account newAcc: Trigger.new)
{
Account acc = entries.get(newAcc.id);
if (Acc.parent_D_B_number__c != newAcc.parent_D_B_number__c)
newAcc.Hierarchy_Status__c = '';
}

}

How to Cutomize pageBlockTable Columns On The Fly in Your VF Pages?

2008-09-30T14:14:00.006-04:00

A few days ago I can across a developer's post having difficulty customizing pageBlockTable columns on the fly. The fact is that pageBlockTable component is designed very flexible by nature and is quite powerful component.

In this article I will demonstrate how you can customize your columns and show to the user what is required to be shown. This is specially useful when creating reports.

Imagine we have a Visualforce page which views Opportunities' information with following characteristics:

Opportunity Name
Account Name
Opportunity Amount
Fixed Interest Amount (%25 of the Amount)
Opportunity Status (based on Close Date, if it is passed then "Closed" if not then "Open")

Let's look at the controller's code first. It is very straight forward, it has only one method:

public class myOppsController

{

private List<Opportunity> opportunities;

public List<Opportunity> getOpportunities()

{

opportunities = [Select Name, Amount, Account.Name, CloseDate from Opportunity];

return opportunities;

}

getOpportunities() property returns a list of Opportunities.
Note: for the simplicity of the example I did not put any conditions or limit in number of rows that we return. However, if you have more than 1000 Opportunity records then before running this code add some conditions or limits to the query.

Well, now let's take a moment to see what we need to be able to customize the view of the selected columns.

<apex:page controller="myOppsController" tabStyle="Opportunity">
<apex:form >
<apex:sectionHeader title="Opps List" />
<apex:pageBlock title="" id="pageBlock">
<apex:pageMessages ></apex:pageMessages>
<apex:pageBlockTable value="{!opportunities}" var="o" rendered="{!NOT(ISNULL(opportunities))}">
<apex:column value="{!o.Name}"></apex:column>
<apex:column value="{!o.Account.Name}"></apex:column>
<apex:column value="{!o.Amount}"></apex:column>
<apex:column >
<apex:facet name="header">Fix Interest</apex:facet>
{! o.Amount * 0.25 }
</apex:column>
<apex:column >
<apex:facet name="header">Status</apex:facet>
<div style="background-color:{!IF(o.CloseDate > TODAY(),'#7CFC00', '#FFA07A')}">
{!IF(o.CloseDate > TODAY(),'Open', 'Closed')}
</div>
</apex:column>

</apex:pageBlockTable>
</apex:pageBlock>
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

As you can see in the above code by using the putting a template in the body of the apex:Column component you can actually go free style!

Testing Your Controller Extentions

2008-09-29T16:05:00.003-04:00

In a previous post I pointed it out how you can get good test coverage when deploying your VF pages. Since then many readers asked me about deploying VF pages with Controller Extensions.

In concept they are the same and the test is done with the same approach!

In this article I will show you how similar the Custom Controllers and Controller Extensions are. Very simple but maybe with a little twist!

Let's imagine that we have a Visualforce Page that extends the standard controller "Contact".

Here is how the page looks like:

<apex:page standardController="Contact" extensions="myControllerExtention">
<apex:form >
<apex:detail id="contactDetail" />
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

Very simple page, so when the page is viewed the URL will be like:
https://cs2.salesforce.com/apex/mypage?id=003200000005LaO

Where id parameter will be a contact's id and the user will see a page the same as Contact's detail page.

The controller looks like this:

public class myControllerExtention {

private Contact con;

public myControllerExtention(ApexPages.StandardController stdController)

{

this.con = (Contact)stdController.getRecord();

}

public string GetContactName()

{

return con.Name;

}

And now is the time we developed the Tester class.

The tester class should implement a method that creates an instance of the Contact controller and then pass that controller to the Constructor of our Extension class. That's it, the rest is the same as testing Custom controllers.

public class testMyPage {

static testMethod void myPage_Test()

{

//Test converage for the myPage visualforce page

PageReference pageRef = Page.MyPage;

Test.setCurrentPageReference(pageRef);

Account newAccount = new Account (name='XYZ Organization');

insert newAccount;

//create first contact

Contact myContact = new Contact (FirstName='Joe',

LastName='Schmoe',

AccountId=newAccount.id);

insert myContact;

ApexPages.StandardController sc = new ApexPages.standardController(myContact);

// create an instance of the controller

myControllerExtention myPageCon = new myControllerExtention(sc);

//try calling methods/properties of the controller in all possible scenarios

// to get the best coverage.

string ConName = myPageCon.GetContactName();

}

Happy coding!