Winter! In August?

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It's odd to be writing this post while here in the UK we are just coming off record temperatures, but in Salesforce terms it will soon be Winter. <Feel free to insert a variant on Winter is Coming here - I feel like I've done enough of that>. 

Winter 23 hits sandboxes on August 26th 2022 - like Christmas I'm sure it gets earlier each year, but more likely it's because this is the 14th Winter release I've experienced! 

If you want to try out the new release on your existing setup, then you'll have a couple of options

• Check the location of your existing sandboxes and hope to find one that is part of the preview group.
  Not my preferred option, as I've usually cut sandboxes for a specific reason and carrying out regression testing on top of new work is a recipe for not doing either of them well.
• Create a new sandbox, or refresh one that you don't need any longer, before August 25th, leaving enough time for the request to complete.  That way there is no need to rely on someone correctly identifying the preview groups and you have a shiny new sandbox purely to confirm that the release doesn't break your existing production setup - no human contact required.

You can find the full sandbox preview instructions here, including the preview groups if you want to do it the hard way. 

If you find a lengthy set of written instructions a bit dull, the Sandbox Preview Guide could be just what you are looking for. Simply enter the sandbox instance, choose what version of Salesforce you want on it - preview or stay on current release, and it will give you simple instructions as to what to do next. It's a beta app, so caveat emptor, but the possibility for serious damage looks limited.

There are other useful dates to be aware of for Winter 23

Pre-release orgs available August 11th

A couple of points to note about these:

• If you signed up for a pre-release org in the past, chances are it's still there - I've been using my Summer '14 pre-release org for over 8 years now and it gets upgraded at the same time as the new ones become available
• They are of limited use. Yes you'll get access to some new functionality before the sandbox preview, and they will get a bit of maintenance, but if you want to properly test your existing applications and configuration then sandboxes are a much better option. In my experience bug fixes come much later in pre-release orgs, if they come at all. Just use them as a chance to get a jump on the release treasure hunt.

Preview Release Notes August 17th

The key word here is preview - there's no guarantee that any of the features in the preview release notes will go live. Most of them do, but I've had more than a few last minute reworks of my release webinars when something has disappeared at the last minute. Keep checking the change log!

Production Goes live the weekends of September 9th, October 7th and October 14th

Don't get too excited about the first weekend - that is for Salesforce only, to give it a workout in the real world and hopefully pick up a few more issues that were will hidden. The rest of us will be in October, which will be on us before we know it.

If you prefer a pictorial representation of the timeline, check out the official Salesforce infographic, with lots more dates for their training events etc. It even mentions Spring '23, which is rather wishing your life away in my view. 

Life may be short, but it feels even shorter measured in Salesforce releases.

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Custom Notifications in Summer 19 Part 1 - Process Builder

Introduction

The Summer 19 Salesforce release is around a month away (check the trust site for the official dates) and my trusty pre-release org has been upgraded which allows me to play with some of the new functionality.

One of the items in the release notes that caught my eye was custom notifications, possibly because I’d been on the pilot and had been looking forward to using it in anger, possibly because I had some solutions that used the old method (see below) of sending notifications and it hurt my eyes every time I looked at it. Either way, I was keen to jump in.

The Old Way

To be clear (oh dear, I’m sounding like a UK politician) we’ve always been able to send notifications through custom code, but it’s been clunky, to put it nicely. You can read the full details in Salesforce1 Notifications from Apex, but the short version is that you have to programmatically create a chatter post using the ChatterConnect API and @mention the user you wanted to notify, and they received a notification that you had mentioned them and had to go to the chatter post to find out what you wanted, Not particularly elegant, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The New Way

Custom notifications are a much better solution - still not perfect but a big improvement on what we currently have. At the moment they are sent from Process Builder, so there’s still a little bit of hoop jumping required to send from Apex code.

Defining the Notification

Before you can send a custom notification, you need to define one via Setup -> Notification Builder -> Notification Types. Click New to create a new notification - for my first example I’m creating a custom notification for when a high priority case is received. Note that I can specify which channels a notification will be sent through. This is a nice feature as I’m more likely to want to notify Mobile users as a rule, as they are out of the office and may not be checking Salesforce that often. That said, as this is a high priority case notification, I’m sending it out everywhere that I can:

Once I have my notification, I can create a process that uses it -note that this is the only way that I can fire a notification directly.

Process Builder

My process is defined for the Case subject, when a record is created or edited:

The high priority case test looks for cases that are new or edited to change the priority field, and the priority field is ‘High’:

And the High Priority Case action sends me a notification that we are not in a good place.

After saving and activating the process, creating a new case with a priority of ‘High’ gives me red bell icon on desktop and my mobile, and a notification that is entirely appropriate to the case - clicking on the detail takes me through to the case itself. which is exactly what I want.

In Part 2 of this post I’ll show how notifications can be started from Apex. You still need a process builder to actually send the notification, but the logic around it can live elsewhere.

Related Posts

• Salesforce 1 Notifications from Apex
• Custom Notifications Release Notes

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Sobject Preview Panel

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Something that I find myself doing at fairly regular intervals is providing selectlists on Visualforce pages to allow a user to choose from a list of records.  Sometimes its because I want to restrict the selection due to complex rules, so a lookup isn't suitable, sometimes I'm not using an inputfield to capture the id, but mostly its because I find it a lot faster to select from a drop down list.

The downside to this is that if the record names are quite similar, it can be difficult for users to pick the right one.  When this is the case, I usually provide a dynamically rendered preview of the record in the page so that the user can check it is the correct record.

Here's a simple example of a dropdown - which of the 'Blog Account' entries is the one I am interested in?

Adding a preview pane shows me the detail of the selected item:

as I actually wanted BrightGen, it is immediately apparent that I've chosen the wrong record (I know the name makes that pretty clear too, but this is only an example :).  I can then choose the correct record and verify that from the details:

The apex controller is very simple - it has a method to retrieve selectoptions for 10 accounts and provides a property to store the user's selection:

public with sharing class DynamicDetail
{
	public String chosenAccountId {get; set;}
	public List<SelectOption> getAccounts()
	{
		List<SelectOption> accOptions=new List<SelectOption>();
		accOptions.add(new SelectOption('Choose', 'Choose'));
		for (Account acc : [select id, Name from Account limit 10])
		{
			accOptions.add(new SelectOption(acc.id, acc.Name));
		}
		
		return accOptions;
	}
}

The page is also pretty simple - a pageblock to choose the account and an actionsupport to rerender the preview panel when a selection is made. Note that I've put the preview pane in the stop facet of an actionstatus. This means that when the user chooses a different account, I don't have to worry about clearing down theuser is entering information that will be presented in a particular context.  For example, entering markup into a rich text field that will appear in a branded Force.com site - having a preview of the content inside the branded page gives you an immediate indicator as to how well the content integrates with the site look and feel.

By the way, if you are seeing odd line numbering on the code samples, this appears to be a bug in chrome.  Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

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