Book Review - Force.com Tips and Tricks

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Disclaimer - I haven't purchased this book - I was sent a copy to review by the publisher.

Force.com Tips and Tricks is written by a couple of my fellow Force.com MVPs, Abhinav Gupta and Ankit Arora. It is aimed at both developers and administrators and packs a lot of information into the 200+ pages.

For Administrators

Administrators get a whole chapter dedicated to tools to make their lives easier, including those that come with the platform as standard (e.g. data loader) and a long list of code share and app exchange packages. There is also a deep dive on Salesforce analytics, covering topics such as custom report types, adding formulae to a report and setting up analytic snapshots - all of which are important for administrators wanting to get the most of the platform.  

For Developers

The book starts off with an introduction to the Force.com platform, covering key concepts for anyone starting out with Force.com development such as multi-tenancy, the metadata driven development model and governor limits. Later chapters take you through setting up development environments and migrating changes between those environments, useful tools for developers from both Salesforce and the wider community, and concludes with a couple of chapters that give great advice on writing flexible and scalable Apex and Visualforce code, as well as tips for troubleshooting when code isn't performing as expected.

For Both

For administrators wanting to understand more about maintaining and extending Force.com applications, the developer specific sections will prove very useful.  By the same token, development in Force.com starts with clicks rather than code, so the administrator-centric chapters are something that every developer should read.

 

This book isn't a training manual for Force.com development - where I think it would have been really useful in the past was as I was starting to carry out serious development with the platform.  I understood enough about the basics to start being productive, but when I was trying something new, I'd be searching the discussion boards and reading blogs to get more information.  With a book like this to hand I'd either have the information that I required right there, or be pointed in the right direction to find out more with minimal effort.  

 I always hope to learn something I didn't know from these books, and this time it was a number of the tools available, particularly to enforce CRUD and FLS when running in the system context.  Its certainly a useful addition to my Salesforce library and one I'm sure I'll be coming back to regularly.

London Salesforce Developers February Meetup

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The February London Salesforce Developers Meetup took place this week, with 30+ people (Kingmakers!) attending. While the usual suspects were in attendance, there were quite a few new faces, which bodes well for the group.

John Stevenson gave an update on the events that are being run for the community - I can definitely say that the Git and Github Kickstarter Workshops are popular, as every time I receive a notification that one is available, by the time I click through to the details its full!

John Mahoney gave a demonstration of the steroid component library - I didn't get to see as much of this as I'd have liked to, as I was advising someone on customer portal setup in the corridor!

And in a startling development, which nobody could have predicted, I gave a short talk on Salesforce Certification!  As I served as a judge on the EMEA Technical Architect Review Board in January, I'm in a tricky position when talking about this certification. I've spent the last year trying to spread the word of how to pass the board, but that's clearly no longer appropriate. I was therefore fortunate to be joined by my colleague, and newly Certified Technical Architect, Chris Eales (@theEalesie), who talked about his experience and gave advice on how to prepare for the board, plus details of the mechanics of the process.  

The slide deck for this talk can be accessed here. (On a related note, I've added a Salesforce Certfication page to this site that contains links to all my certification related posts - you can access this from the right hand sidebar).

The meetups take place every month and include beer, pizza and plenty of time for networking.  If you haven't made one yet, we'd love to see you. Make sure to join the Meetup group to get notified of all upcoming events.
 

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Improved Force.com Discussion Boards

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This week saw a welcome revamp of the Force.com discussion boards.  There's been quite a bit of debate recently about the relative merits of the discussion boards versus the Salesforce Stack Exchange beta site.  Personally, I think there's room for both as they serve different purposes.  I also think that the more channels for the community to work together the better - for one to succeed there's no reason that others have to fail.  I realise that this is an area of religious wars for some people, so bear in mind that this post represents my opinions on this - if you disagree, there's nothing stopping you writing up your own post!

My thoughts of some of the strengths and weaknesses of these sites are as follows:

• Gamification.  
  This is an area where Stack Exchange is very strong.  There's a plethora of badges that can be earned, each user has a reputation score based on up or down votes for questions and answers, answers marked as accepted etc.  Another interesting ranking is a user's acceptance rate.  This indicates how often a user is accepting answers, and a low score indicates they are asking for a lot of help but not marking answers solved for the benefits of others.  The Force.com boards, by contrast, have previously ranked users by the number of posts that they have made - e.g. 150 for Trusted Contributor and topping out at 500 for Super Contributor.  Where this is lacking is rating the quality of posts - I've seen at least one instance in the past where a user has earned Trusted Contributor by making 150 'please write my test case' style posts.  This is an area where the revamp has improved matters through the introduction of kudos - you can read about how this works in detail at the developer relations blog post.  What matters though, is the leader board is now focused on kudos rather than tags, which should lead to a lot less meaningless tags on messages.
   
• Participation.
  This is an area where the Force.com boards win hands down - the number of users and volume of posts far exceeds the Stack Exchange site.  Of course boards have the advantage that they've been around longer, but I feel there is more to it than this, as I'll cover in my next point.  The quality of the posts on the boards is hugely variable though, whereas the up/down voting system on Stack Exchange tends to ensure that the quality of posts is high - users can also vote for questions to be closed if they feel they are asking for help with homework, could be answered by a simple search etc.
   
• Support for Newbies.
  This is likely to be my most contentious point.  I don't think that Stack Exchange is a good place to go for help if you are starting out with Force.com.  Its good for advanced users who have hit a roadblock, researched the problem and been unable to find a solution. Its also reasonably good for intermediates who know there is a specific problem with their code but can't figure out exactly where its going wrong.  Where it really falls down is for those who don't know where to start.  Post up a question asking for basic, generic help and you'll be down voted and closed very quickly. There's also a touch of mob mentality or swarming about this - questions can be quickly hammered down, but the voting up doesn't seem to happen with the same pace.  The boards are much more tolerant of beginner questions - sometimes there are pages of responses attempting to get to the bottom of what the problem actually is before even attempting to solve it.  In case you think I'm being too hard on Stack Exchange, the format doesn't really support this kind of question discovery, so I can understand why some questions are treated in this way.  I often describe the boards as the place to ask bad questions, or a home for those who don't know what they don't know.
   
• Existing answers.
  This is another area where Stack Exchange cannot hope to compete, due to the amount of time that the boards have been around.  You'll probably have to work a little harder to find answers to esoteric questions on the boards, due to the variable quality of the posts, but there are tens of thousands of solutions in there.  In fact, I'd lay money that before posting on Stack Exchange most, if not all, users will have searched the discussion boards. And to be fair and equitable, if they've done that research before posting on Stack Exchange their question will be upvoted and answered.

Reading the above, you might think that I'm not a fan of Stack Exchange - in fact, nothing could be further from the truth, I'm on it most days and I'm in the top 5 for reputation.  There's a place for both sites and, while there is some overlap, they generally serve different purposes.  That said, I do prefer the discussion boards - partly as I have four years history with them, but mainly because I'm interested in getting people started on the platform and improving beginners. 

But enough about how the boards fit into the wider landscape, the important point is that they are getting some love, having been left to fend for themselves for a while  Its great that the board owners are doing this, but there are plenty of things that we participants can do to improve things.  To that end, here's some of my thoughts on board etiquette:

• If you post a question and you get a solution, mark it.  
  It can be disheartening to put hours of effort into drilling down to find the actual problem and coming up with a solution, only to find the original poster then moves on to their next question without a backward glance.  It also means that another user researching a similar problem doesn't know that there's a solution somewhere in the thread.
  
  
• Don't beg for marks in your signature.
  Having said that you should always mark solutions, I can see why some people don't.  If I posted a question and every response, even a 'tell me more', demanded that it be marked as the solution, I'd start to tune out the whole solution side of it.
  
  
• Don't just post up requirements.
  Its fair enough to post up a question asking how to get started with a particular piece of functionality (e.g. how can I submit a form via javascript), but if you are copying and pasting your requirements/homework, (e.g. 'I have to build a system that manages projects') , your post is likely to remain alone with zero responses. My response to these is often 'good luck' or 'thanks for keeping us in the loop'!
  
  
• Have a go first.
  If you have any idea where to start, have a stab.  Nobody gets flamed for posting bad or incomplete code.  It shows that you are trying to help yourself and, certainly in my case, is likely to make people want to help you.
  
  
• Don't post pages of code.
  If you do this, really what you are saying is 'figure out my code and tell me what is wrong with it', which is a big ask.  Try to narrow down where you think the problem is and post discrete section.
  
  
• Post some code!
  You have to give us a chance!  If you post up that you are getting a null pointer exception with no context and no code, its highly unlikely you'll get a solution.  If an error points to a particular line of code, there's no excuse for not posting it.
  
  
• Don't contact helpful people directly
  If someone is knowledgeable and solves a few problems for you, don't ask for direct contact details.  Essentially what you are saying there is you'd like free, private support from them when it suits you.  Most of us on the boards have day jobs where we charge people for our skills and experience, so you have the option to pay for an engagement if you need a personal service.  Receiving message after message asking for "a way to get hold of you so we don't have to wait" can quickly become irritating,
  
  
• Don't send questions in private messages.
  Think about what you are doing here - you've taken advantage of the community to find someone knowledgeable, but then you don't want the discussion to be public to help others.  I don't even respond to these messages any more I'm afraid, as I get so many of them.
   
• Don't use it as your blog.
  Every now and then we'll get some blog posts under the guise of discussion posts.  I can see why people do this, as it gives a blog a huge, unearned audience.  The home for these is Developerforce, which accepts blog posts and code recipes from the community. 
  
  
• Be polite.
  If you think a question or response is bad, there's no reason to be rude.  This is, thankfully, very rare on the boards.  Its always worth restating though, as the negative effects can be significant - I've been involved with some communities  where its felt like there was active effort to discourage anyone apart from experts from posting, and to do this in a particularly unpleasant manner.  If you think the question is bad, try to find out what the user is trying to ask.  If you think an answer contains bad advice, frame your criticism with the correct solution - remember, you might be wrong and they might be right!
  
  
• Get (more) involved.
  Most of the above are about what not to do.  If none of those apply, keep doing what you are doing, but do more of it.  If you are relatively new to the platform but starting to get the hang of it, start posting answers - nobody will jump on you if you make a mistake.

We have a great community, so lets do all we can to grow and improve it for everyone.

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Send SMS Messages from Force.com

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One of the app exchange offerings of my company, BrightGen, is BrightSMS. This is a free app that allows the sending of single or bulk SMS messages to UK or international numbers - you only pay for the messages that you send.

Earlier versions of BrightSMS provided functionality to send SMS messages from Visualforce pages, based on the user typing the message in and selecting a mobile number/contact/lead as the message recipient.   Version 3.0 introduces support for sending SMS from @future methods, which means that messages can be sent from triggers when record details change.

Getting Started

Installation and setup is covered in the Installation Guide.  Once you have installed the package, follow the User Guide to register an account.  The first account you register in your Salesforce org gets 10 free messages.  Note that the account is tied to a mobile phone number and you can only register a number once - so the 10 free messages is a single shot deal.  Once I've been through the installation I usually send myself an SMS through the packaged pages to confirm its all working.

The Code

My example trigger is on the case sobject, and sends an SMS to the contact associated with the case when the status changes, as long as the contact has supplied a mobile phone number. 

trigger Case_au on Case (after update)
{
	List<Id> caseIdsToSMS=new List<Id>();

	// get the contact ids
	Set<Id> contactIds=new Set<Id>();
	for (Case cs : trigger.new)
	{
		if (null!=cs.contactId)
		{
			contactIds.add(cs.contactId);
		}
	}
	
	Map<Id, Contact> contsById=new Map<Id, Contact>();
	contsById.putAll([select id, MobilePhone from Contact where id in:contactIds]);

	// pull back the contact and check the mobile number is supplied
	
	for (Case cs : trigger.new)
	{
		if (null!=cs.ContactId)
		{
			Contact cnt=contsById.get(cs.ContactId);
			if ( (cs.Status != trigger.oldMap.get(cs.id).Status) &&
		    	 ( (null!=cnt.MobilePhone) && (cnt.MobilePhone.length()>0) )
		   	)
			{
				caseIdsToSMS.add(cs.id);
			}
		}
	}
	
        // delegate to a future method, as callouts aren't allowed in triggers
	CaseUtils.SendCaseUpdatedSMS(caseIdsToSMS);
}

and the future method that sends the SMS:

public with sharing class CaseUtils
{
    @Future(callout=true)
    public static void SendCaseUpdatedSMS(list<Id> csIds)
    {
	for (Case cs : [Select CaseNumber, Contact.MobilePhone, Contact.FirstName, Contact.LastName, Status from Case where Id IN : csIds] )
	{
	BG_SMS.BrightSMSSubmitSMSMessage bsms = new BG_SMS.BrightSMSSubmitSMSMessage();
		bsms.brightSmsAccountId = 'AccountIdGoesHere';
		bsms.rateCode = '1';
		bsms.senderID = 'BrightGen';
		bsms.mobileNumber = cs.Contact.MobilePhone.trim();
		bsms.smsMessage = 'Hi ' + cs.Contact.FirstName +
				  ', Just to let you know the status of your case {' +
				  cs.CaseNumber +
				  '} has been changed to ' +
				  cs.Status;
		bsms.submitSMSMessage();
   	}
    }
}

Replace AccountIdGoesHere with the id of the SMS account that you registered in the Getting Started session.  The senderId will be displayed as the sender of the SMS, so replace this with something specific to you or your company.  Finally, the smsMessage contains the message text that will be sent.  BrightSMS allows you to send up to a maximum of 459 characters, but these will be sent as 3 individual SMS messages, as the maximum individual SMS message size is 153 characters.

Note that as there are a limit of 10 callouts per transaction, if there are more than 10 case updates to be sent, this code will produce an error.  If you have a large amount of messages to send on a regular basis, its better to use Batch Apex and split the processing up into multiple transactions.

Sending Messages

First up, I create a contact in my org and supply a mobile number (note, this is not my real mobile number):

 

 

I then create a case and associate my contact record with it:

 

If the status of the case is then changed from New to Working, I automatically receive an SMS informing me of the change:

 

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Mobile Quiz Pages

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A few months ago, around the time of Dreamforce, I built a Force.com online quiz application.  One of the items on my todo list has been to provide a mechanism to take a quiz via a mobile device.  As I had some spare time in the run up to Christmas this weekend, I've built the first version of this.

I've taken a simplistic approach to this and simply created mobile versions of the various site pages using JQuery Mobile, using the techniques described in one of my earlier blog posts.

Signing up for a test using the latest version of the app at http://tests.bobbuzzard.org will include a QR code in the confirmation page and email, and also a direct link in the email, as shown below:

 

scanning the QR code takes you to the mobile start page:

Navigation is much the same as the full site, with the slight change that the buttons appear at the top of the page.  The question pages have the same functionality as the full sight, allowing percentage confidence and notes/feedback to be provided:

  

The View All page displays a list of the actual answers selected, rather than the a,b,c question indices.  The percentage confidence and lack of answers are flagged as before:

and clicking on any of the list entries takes you back to the question, with the percentage confidence header:

As I mentioned earlier, this is a simplistic solution.  Its quite slow, as the view state is being transferred backwards and forwards to the server, and the JQuery Mobile transitions can't be used as the mobile browser is being redirected between pages rather than using Ajax.  Javascript Remoting is a better solution for the server side interaction than using Visualforce forms, in my opinion, but that's a topic for another post.

Happy Christmas to all my readers - hope you find the mobile pages useful and be sure to let me know if you hit any problems. 

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Building a Templated Web Site with Force.com - Part 4

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In Part 1 of this series, I looked at how to turn an HTML page into a Visualforce page in order to use it as a template for a Force.com site. Part 2 covered how to turn the page into a template and create a home page that used the template to provide the common content.  Part 3 explained how to expose the pages to the world via an unauthenticated Force.com site.

Thus far I've focused on a single page, but the site has a number of tabs that are supplied by default in the template - Blogs, Photos, About, Links and Contacts.  For the purposes of this blog post, I'm going to create two additional pages - About and Contacts.

As I already have a home page that uses the template, I've cloned this to create new visualforce pages named 'about' and 'contact'.  These contain minimal content.

The contact page:

and the about page:

Next I need to create a way to navigate to the pages.  While the tabs contain links, these are empty anchor tags, as can be seen from the template markup:

<div id="menu">
	<ul>
		<li class="current_page_item"><a href="#">Homepage</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Blog</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Photos</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">About</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Links</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Contact</a></li>
	</ul>
</div>

Changing the links to point to my Visualforce pages might seem as simple as replacing the '#' with the Visualforce page link.  Unfortunately, Force.com sites need the page to be specified as '/contact', while if the pages are accessed from the Salesforce UI it needs to be specified as '/apex/contact'.  For this reason, its best practice to use the $Page global variable - this will generate the appropriate link based on the user's context.  As I've created pages for the Homepage, About and Contact tabs, the new markup is:

<div id="menu">
	<ul>
		<li class="current_page_item"><a href="{!$Page.Home}">Homepage</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Blog</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Photos</a></li>
		<li><a href="{!$Page.about}">About</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Links</a></li>
		<li><a href="{!$Page.Contact}">Contact</a></li>
	</ul>
</div>

The links now work correctly, but the Homepage tab is always the one highlighted due to the class="current_page_item" attribute. This markup exists in the template, so I need find a way to identify the actual page and set the attribute on the appropriate tab.  

I could write a Visualforce controller for the page, but I'm trying to avoid that at this point and build the site entirely in Visualforce.  I could also add some markup to determine the name of the current URL, and highlight the tab that matches.  The downside to that is if I change the purpose of a page, I have to update the template.  Ideally I'd like to define the tab that should be highlighted in the underlying page, and make the template responsible for the rendering only.

The way that I've handed this is to set the tab name into a variable using the <apex:variable/> component, and then conditionally render the class name based on this variable.

In the underlying pages, its simply another define component - here's the markup from the about page:

<apex:define name="tabdef">
	<apex:variable var="tab" value="about"/>
</apex:define>

there's a little more to do in the template page - I have to define an initial value for the 'tab' variable, otherwise I can't use it elsewhere in the page - I've defaulted to the Homepage tab - that way if I have pages that don't belong to a particular tab, the leftmost will be highlighted.  Then I have to include the value from the underlying page (if this isn't present the default will be used) and finally check the value of tab variable when rendering each tab element.

<div id="menu">
	<apex:variable var="tab" value="home" />
	<apex:insert name="tabdef" />
	<ul>
		<li class="{!IF(tab=='home', 'current_page_item', '')}"><a href="{!$Page.Home}">Homepage</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Blog</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Photos</a></li>
		<li class="{!IF(tab=='about', 'current_page_item', '')}"><a href="{!$Page.about}">About</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Links</a></li>
		<li class="{!IF(tab=='contact', 'current_page_item', '')}"><a href="{!$Page.Contact}">Contact</a></li>
	</ul>
</div>

Looking at my contact page, now, the correct tab is highlighted:

All that remains is to add the new Visualforce pages to my Force.com site.  On the site setup page (Setup -> App Setup -> Develop -> Sites and click through the site label), select the Edit button on the Site Visualforce Pages section:

and then add the new pages via the dialog and click the 'Save' button:

Navigating to the about page via the site's custom URL, shows that all of my new functionality has been made available to the site:

 

The template, pages and static resources are available in the Part4 directory of the github repository for this blog series at:

https://github.com/keirbowden/blog_force_com_sites

This post is probably the final one in this series, unless another topic occurs to me or is suggested in the comments.

 

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Building a Templated Web Site with Force.com - Part 3

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In Part 1 of this series, I looked at how to turn an HTML page into a Visualforce page in order to use it as a template for a Force.com site.  Part 2 covered how to turn the page into a template and create a home page that used the template to provide the common content.  

Up to now the pages have only been available to users that have logged in to the Salesforce system. This post will show how to expose the pages in a Force.com site, to allow access from the wider web.

Before creating a Force.com site I have to choose my domain name - so I navigate to Setup -> App Setup -> Develop -> Sites and the following page is presented:

As I'm using a Force.com Free Edition org (yes, I was lucky enough to be able to grab a couple of these when they were available - I only wish I'd had the foresight to grab about 50!) I can't change the rather ugly default domain name, but in Enterprise/Unlimited Edition you can choose what you like, as long as someone else hasn't taken it.  I'm not stuck with this domain name however, as I can define a custom 'vanity' URL for my site, which I'll set up later.

Ticking the box and confirming that I understand I can't change the domain name, registers my domain and takes me to the back to the Sites page with my domain defined.

I then click the 'New' button to create my new site.  As this is for demo purposes only, I've filled in the minimum amount of information.  If you'd like more information on the purpose of each of these fields, check the help page by clicking the 'Help for this Page' link at the top right.

As I have specified my 'home' Visualforce page, this is automatically included in the list of pages for the site:

As an aside, whenever you add a Visualforce page to a site, your site automatically gets access to any Apex classes that it depends on. 

And that's it!  I can now navigate to the default site address and access my page without going through any form of authentication.

While my site is now available on the internet, the chances of anyone bothering to type in the full URL are pretty slim, so the next task is to set up the vanity URL. This has to be a CNAME redirect from my personal domain to the Force.com site domain name.  In my case I'm going to create a subdomain to bobbuzzard.org of example.bobbuzzard.org.  My registration system is Freeparking, and I have to set up an alias to the Force.com A record in order for the CNAME record to be created:

I can then verify that my record has been created using an online nslookup tool:

 

Finally, update the site configuration to define the custom URL:

Sometimes the DNS records don't propagate for a while, so if the vanity URL doesn't work, give it a couple of hours and try again.

Accessing my site via http://example.bobbuzzard.org shows that everything is set up correctly and propagated:

 

In the next post I'll add pages for one or two of the other tabs and show one way to highlight the tab associated with the page.

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