I’m going to assume that you’ve set up a portal, its associated Force.com Site, written a custom login page and its controller in Visualforce and Apex, and set it as the ‘Authorization Required Page’ for the Site (here’s a step-by-step tutorial I wrote on the topic last year that will walk you through the details). As I mentioned in that earlier post, your Portal users must have the ‘API Enabled’ permission on their profile. Since you can’t set this on the default ‘High Volume Customer Portal’ profile, you will need to create a custom profile as a clone of the existing one and check ‘API Enabled’ on that custom profile.

Now you’re ready to write a mobile app for your Portal users.

I highly recommend installing the Salesforce Mobile SDK and using one of its template applications (iOS, Android) to experiment. The Contact Explorer is particularly useful for our purposes, since Portal users can access Contacts via the API. I’ll focus on the hybrid iOS case here, since that’s where my experience is, but the principles are the same for native and Android apps.

In Xcode, create the hybrid template app by selecting File | New | New Project, clicking ‘Hybrid Force.com App’, and hitting next. Give your app a ‘Product Name’. Since we’re just experimenting, we’ll use the sample Consumer Key (if you’re writing a real app, you’ll need to create a Connected App in a Developer Edition org and use its Consumer Key). Do NOT select ‘Use Automatic Reference Counting’. Select a location for your project directory, and the Mobile SDK will create a template project.

One manual step is required before you can run the app – select the yellow ‘www’ folder in the Project Navigator view on the left, right click, and delete it, clicking ‘Remove References Only’. Now right click the top-most yellow folder, select Add Files to “[Your Project]“, find the ‘www’ folder in the project and select it. Select ‘Create folder references for any added folders’ and click ‘Add’. A blue ‘www’ folder will now be visible in the Project Navigator.

Now you can run the template app, either on the iOS Simulator, or a real iOS device. Click ‘Run’, and, when the app launches, you should see a login page.

If you don’t, check that you correctly deleted and re-added that ‘www’ folder as detailed above. By default, the mobile app is configured for accessing production or developer edition orgs. Login with a username and password and you’ll see the authorization page.

Click ‘Allow’ and you’ll see a series of buttons. Click ‘Fetch SFDC contacts’, scroll down, and you should see a list of Contact records from your org.

So far so good – we’ve retrieved a contact list as a ‘regular’ Salesforce user. How do we enable this for Portal users? As I mentioned in the earlier blog post, we can now use the Force.com Site Secure Web Address for OAuth. In the case of a Mobile SDK app, we need to set this in the app settings. Click the Home button and open the iOS Settings App. You’ll see an entry for your template app. Click it and you’ll see its settings page:

Set ‘Logout Now’ to ‘On’, change ‘Login Host’ from ‘Production’ to ‘Custom Host’, then set the ‘Custom Host’ to the hostname (just the hostname – no https:// prefix) of your Force.com Site. In my case, this is authtest-developer-edition.na14.force.com. Restart the app, and you should see your Site’s custom login page. Here’s mine:

NOTE – the Mobile SDK is configured to load pages from salesforce.com and force.com ONLY. If you try to login with Facebook (via an Authentication Provider) or any other external site, you’ll get a ‘whitelist error’. To allow an external site, you will need to add it to the whitelist. In Xcode, open the ‘Supporting Files’ folder, and click the ‘Cordova.plist’ file. Open the ‘External Hosts’ array and you will see the existing whitelist: *.force.com and *.salesforce.com. You can add your required hosts to this list, remembering any additional locations for static files and the like. For example, for Facebook login, you’ll need to add *.facebook.com, *.fbcdn.net and fbstatic-a.akamaihd.net.

With that in place, you should be able to login to the Portal. You should see the same authorization page, then be able to retrieve a contact list, just as you did before, but this time in the context of a Portal user. Congratulations!

Coming Soon – Salesforce Communities

Salesforce Communities will be generally available in the Summer ’13 release (safe harbor!) – you’ll be pleased to know that you can enable a mobile app for Community users, and it’s MUCH easier than it was with Portal. You get an automatically built login page for your Community, including your branding and whichever Authentication Providers and SAML Identity Providers you have selected for login. You just need to set the community hostname and path in the mobile app config – for example, UniversalTelco.force.com/customers. Here’s the login page for an example community I configured to show in my Salesforce Identity workshop next week at GlueCon:

Here’s a short video that shows the different login settings:

Building a mobile app for Portal or Community users? Let us know in the comments!

Shout out to The @forcedotcom Team! @imsorrysandwich & @oksman – Got me all setup using the #MobileSDK framework. Now I can play this W/E!

— Joshua Hoskins ☁ (@jhoskins) May 17, 2013

#salesforce governor limits on no. of code statements help make you think creatively in writing code and get rid of the fat coding style.

— Vishal Shah (@vishalashah) May 17, 2013

The competition starts now.Mobile Developer Challenge 2013 with salesforce.com lnkd.in/G8h_z6

— Michael Traw (@Trawsome) May 16, 2013

Here are some top Salesforce Developer jobs this week from around the world:

Know anyone for this job? Salesforce Developer in New Jersey bull.hn/l/18S2E/5 #job

— Dan Grossberg (@m1ndhive) May 17, 2013

Salesforce Developer, full time Toronto in Toronto, ON Canada bull.hn/l/1BBN0/1 #job

— George Tzamalis (@georgetzamalis) May 17, 2013

Job: Sales force Developer (programming and english advanced) in Valparaiso, Chile bull.hn/l/185TA/2 #JOBS#SALESFORCE#DEVEL

— Romina Garate (@EVS_recruitment) May 17, 2013

The AppExchange is a tool for reinvention.  It’s a mechanism for driving change.

For some people, the AppExchange is a completely new and totally unique path to personal growth.

If you like stats, check these out. More than 1,800 apps. More than 1.7m installs. 70% of the Fortune 100 have installed an app. The stats go on and on. Read Adam Seligman’s presentation from Business App Bootcamp for more.

I’m thinking about this today for three reasons.

First, I had a chance to listen to the excellent Button Click Admin podcast this week featuring none other than Michael Farrington (@MichaelForce).  If you’ve been around the community a while, you’ve probably run into either Michael or his excellent apps Field Trip and Draggin’ Role.  44 5 star reviews and 28 reviews, 4.5 stars, respectively (as of today).  These are great tools he needed.  So he took his great ideas and turned them into apps.  These apps have created huge career opportunities for him.

Second, Garry Polmateer over at Red Argyle (@DarthGarry) just released High Five, a collection of “Five fields every Salesforce Instance Should Have.”  This app started off as a column on the Salesforce Blog.  This kind of domain knowledge is an obvious shoe in for an app.  If you’re blogging about a solution to a business problem, building an app helps your readers understand your ideas in a much more concrete way.  I’m so glad Red Argyle did this.  They’re reshaping their careers, their business and their world.

Third, I’ve had a chance to spend some time with the good people at Level Eleven, and learn about the story behind their app, Compete (74 5 star reviews!). Bob Marsh (@BobMarsh5) is their CEO, and loves talking about his journey.  The highlight for me?  He went from idea to paying customer in only four months.  Four. Months.  And since then, investment and significant enterprise sales have followed.  Bob’s Twitter profile cracks me a up: could be a decent golfer, but he’s building a business instead.  Smart move.

There are a lot of great stories of entrepreneurs who have created the future they wanted by building apps.  Scott Hemmeter at Arrowpointe has done it.  Jeremy Kraybill and the team at Dashcord have done it.  The list goes on and on and on and on and on and ……. you get the idea.

Getting started is easy.  Taking the first step is up to you.  If you have questions, there’s tons of people who will help if you just ask (including me).  Good luck!

@ReidCarlberg

What are Sandbox templates?

Sandboxes contain copies of your organization’s configuration and (optionally) data. Use sandboxes for training or to test, configure, and deploy changes to a production organization. Full sandboxes are particularly useful for development teams to coordinate testing and deployment to production organizations.

Previously, when you created a Full sandbox, all of your organization’s data was copied to the sandbox. Now, Sandbox templates let you pick-and-choose specific objects and data to copy to a Full sandbox, save your preferences, and then reuse the template for new Full sandboxes.

Why Use Templates?

Sandbox templates:

• Give you the ability to keep sensitive data from a Full sandbox.
• Control the size of a Full sandbox. Smaller sandboxes are created and refreshed more quickly than large ones.
• Maintain multiple, reusable templates for different use-cases and development teams.

Sandboxes are now easier to use, too…

The Summer ’13 release also includes an enhanced Sandbox user interface.

The new pages:

• Tell you how many of each sandbox license you have (and how many are in use).
• Provide more information about each type of sandbox to help you decide which one to use.
• Walk you through the steps to create a new sandbox.
• Include Sandbox Templates and Sandbox History tabs with detailed information to help you manage your templates and sandboxes.

Want to see this in action?

You can view a video demo in the Summer ’13 Release Training page.

In the Force.com section, click “Play Now” and view the Sandbox topic of the video.

Related Resources

For other information about Sandboxes, check out the DeveloperForce Tools and Toolkits page, the Sandbox Overview in the Salesforce online help, and the Development Lifecycle Guide.

Over the past 18 months or so I have spent a LOT of time working with customers looking to build mobile apps, often using the Salesforce Platform as a mobile backend and connecting to customer data. During this time, a number of common patterns kept emerging. I finally carved out some time to put these mobile pattern down, first in code as part of a reference mobile application that includes a consumer app written with the new developer mobile packs (specifically backbone and bootstrap) that’s running on Heroku, and a Mobile SDK hybrid app, again using backbone, and also a tutorial on how to implement the patterns yourself.

Check out the Enterprise Mobile Patterns guide for five key design patterns for building mobile apps on the Salesforce Platform.

• As a new developer, you’ll learn step-by-step how to quickly build a cloud app while learning the foundations of the platform in this hands-on tutorial. By the end of the workshop you’ll be able to create an app using point-and-click development and extend your app using Visualforce Apex Code.
• The advanced track picks up where the beginner track leaves off, walking you through unit testing, generating non-HTML pages with Visualforce, Using Apex triggers, asynchronous data handling, and more.
• In the ISV track, you will learn how you can build commercial apps on the Salesforce Platform, and partner with salesforce.com to build the next big app for government or business.

The DC ELEVATE workshop will be led by veteran Salesforce technical gurus Josh Birk @joshbirk, Gordon Jackson @FR4G4M3MN0N, Ryan Upton @ryanjupton and Daniel Mehlman @DanTheCloudGuy

Come learn how to build declarative apps, add security, and utilize Visualforce while getting the latest tips, tricks, techniques and best practices for building apps in the cloud.

We will be at the Westin Tyson’s Corner, on Tuesday, May 21 starting at 8:00 am. We are nearly sold-out, but you still have time to book your seat. Register, pack your laptop and come on down to raise your cloud developer skills to the next level. If you have any questions about the workshop, feel free to contact me @kavindrapatel

What is the most efficient way to get all those records into the system?

The Force.com Extreme Data Loading Series

This is the third entry in a six-part series of blog posts covering many aspects of data loading for very large enterprise deployments.

Here are the topics planned for this series.

• Designing the data model for performance
• Loading data into a lean configuration
• Suspending events that fire on insert
• Sequencing load operations
• Managing bulk data loads
• Taking advantage of deferred sharing

This post explains how to speed up large data loads by temporarily disabling data operations that customers frequently perform during record inserts.

Why Suspend Data Validation and Enrichment Events on Record Insert?

The Force.com platform includes powerful tools for making sure data entered by the users of your applications is clean and includes appropriate relationships between records.

• Validation rules ensure that the data users enter for new and existing records meets the standards specified by your business.
• Workflow rules allow you to automate field updates, email alerts, outbound messages, and tasks associated with workflow, approvals, and milestones.
• Assignment rules distribute leads and cases to appropriate teams, and accounts to appropriate territories.
• Triggers are Apex code that allow you to manipulate data and perform other actions on record insert.

While these tools can allow you to preserve data integrity during normal operations, they can also slow inserts to a crawl if you enable them during massive data loads. As we mentioned in our last post on loading lean, when you reach the cutover point while replacing a legacy system, you might want to load your data as quickly as possible to minimize the effort required to synchronize it.

But if you turn off validation, workflow, and triggers, how can you ensure that, once you’ve finished loading, you have accurate data and the right relationships established between objects? There are three key phases to this effort.

1. Analyzing and preparing data
2. Disabling events for loading
3. Post-processing

Let’s look at each of these phases in more detail.

Analyzing and Preparing Data

To load safely without triggers, validation rules, and workflow rules running, you can examine the business requirements that you could ordinarily meet with these operations, then ask the following questions to find suitable alternatives.

1. Which of your requirements can you meet by data cleansing before data loading, or by sequencing load operations where there are critical dependencies between objects?

For example, if you normally use a validation rule to ensure that user entries are within valid ranges, you can query the data set before loading to find and fix records that don’t conform to the rules.

Where you have parent-child relationships in your data model, you need to have the IDs of the parent records before you can insert their children. In these cases, you can sequence operations to load the parents, extract the IDs, and update the source data to include the parent IDs before loading the child records.

With multiple dependencies, this sequencing can be tricky, so make sure you check Architect Core Resources for “Sequencing Load Operations,” the next installment in this series.

2. Which of your requirements can you meet by post-processing records after data loading?

One typical set of use cases in this category relates to data enrichment – which could involve adding lookup relationships between objects, roll-up summary fields to parent records, and other data relationships between records. Another set relates to the triggering of workflows and other business actions that allow you to process and take advantage of the new data. We’ll come back to these in the Post Processing section below.

Disabling Events for Loading

Once you have analyzed all your data validation and enrichment requirements, and planned actions to manage them either before or after data loading, you can temporarily disable your rules and triggers to speed up loading. Simply edit each rule and set it to “inactive” status.

You can disable Validation, Lead and Case assignment rules, and Territory assignment rules in the same way.

Temporarily disabling triggers is a bit more complex and requires some preparation. First, create a Custom Setting and a corresponding checkbox field to control when a trigger should fire. Then include a statement like the one highlighted below in your trigger code. Once this is done, disabling or enabling your trigger is as simple as editing the checkbox field.

Note: In practice, a more robust architecture would include a single, top-level trigger class, with all the work done in helper classes off the main trigger class. Each helper class would have its own custom setting and checkbox field to turn the setting on or off. You can configure exactly what you want to run and what you don’t simply by selecting or deselecting the appropriate fields.

Post-Processing

Once you have finished loading your data, it is time to complete the data enrichment and  configuration tasks you have deferred until this point:

• Add lookup relationships between objects, roll-up summary fields to parent records, and other data relationships between records.
• Enhance records in Salesforce with foreign keys or other data to facilitate integration with your other systems.
• Batch Apex and the Force.com Bulk API are both efficient methods for performing these updates to a very large number of records.

• Reset the fields on the custom settings you created for triggers, so that they will fire appropriately on record creation and updates.
• Turn validation, workflow, and assignment rules back on so they will trigger the appropriate actions as users enter and edit records.

Note: When you enable these rules again, they will not automatically process the data you have just loaded. You might have to use the Data Loader or additional Apex coding to trigger an update on these records.

Summary

When you need to load a very large amount of data quickly, you want to ensure that each insert is as efficient as possible. With appropriate preparation and post-processing, you can disable data validation and enrichment operations while loading–without compromising your data integrity or business rules.

Related Resources

• Extreme Force.com Data Loading, Part 1: Tune Your Data Model
• Extreme Force.com Data Loading, Part 2: Loading into a Lean Salesforce Configuration
• Best Practices for Deployments with Large Data Volumes
• Designing Record Access for Enterprise Scale
• About Validation Rules
• Creating Workflow Rules
• Managing Apex Triggers
• Architect Core Resources

About the Author

Bud Vieira is an Architect Evangelist within the Technical Enablement team of the salesforce.com Customer-Centric Engineering group. The team’s mission is to help customers understand how to implement technically sound salesforce.com solutions. Check out all of the resources that this team maintains on the Architect Core Resources page of Developer Force.