Osama's Weblog

For it’s over 500 million active users, Facebook introduces a new feature called Facebook Places. Location-based check-in services are of common interest these days. Facebook Places is launched in partnership with Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Booyah that provide location-based services currently. Although the users of these services will already be familiar updating their friends about where they are, Facebook Places will change everything. Foursquare comes with a Facebook Connect option and updates user’s news feeds but it seems like Facebook now intends to have it as a full fledged feature. Currently Facebook places is limited to people in the United States. Location can be updated by logging on to Facebook via a smartphone. If not an iphone user, one can go to touch.facebook.com where a “Places” tab appears. Using GPS data, the current location of the user is detected. Like Foursquare, one can check-in to places nearby. Moreover, “tagging” friends is also possible to indicate who they are hanging out with. Facebook places will help people promote their businesses and therefore, it is quite likely that it will overpower the usage of other location-based services. It is not exactly clear what will happen to the “partners” of the launch. Moreover Twitter and Google are expected to show some reaction to this. Though Twitter already includes the “location” feature, Facebook Places is not going to be easy to compete with.

While reading a blog post on Winter 11 chatter upcoming, I noticed the new UI that is expecting to be released in the upcoming release.

Have a look

Salesforce Winter 11 UI

Things to be noticed include

• Application dropdown menu
• No sidebar search. But on the top of the page
• More options under User name.

I am writing after quite a long time. Was busy at work and studies as well.

There is a very annoying exception “MIXED_DML_OPERATION, DML operation on setup object is not permitted after you have updated a non-setup object (or vice versa): {sObject} original object: {sObject}”

There you cannot perform DML on what salesforce calls setup objects(User in this case) and non-setup object in the same context.

There is a workaround that allows multiple DML operations in same transactions

If you want to perform two DML operations sequentially, create a separate method for 2nd DML operation with @future token.
make sure you put System.RunAs() in the method. Your overall method should look like this

private static void myFunc()
{
///1st DML operation
User usr = [Select id from User where Id = :UserInfo.getUserId()];
System.RunAs(usr)
{
Test.startTest();
myFunc2();
Test.stopTest();
}
}@future
private static void myFunc2()
{
///2nd DML operation
}

I hope this helps

Last month Salesforce.com and PayPal announced Paypal X toolkit for Force.com Platform.

PayPal, as everybody knows is the most commonly used payment gateway in e-commerce world. The important points about PayPal are:

• Facilitates payments
• Pay anyone, receive from anyone
• Account management
• Tools for information and reporting

PayPal provides its APIs for integration with other e-commerce websites. They recently launched few changes in their system which are :

• Pre-approval APIs
• Refund
• Convert Currency
• Parallel Payments
• Chained Payments

Using Parallel payments, you can split a single payment to any number of receivers. For example, a person purchases different items from different sellers. The person doesn’t have to arrange separate transactions for each seller. What he can do is just arrange a single payment which can be distributed among all the sellers. Isn’t it great?

Using Chained payments, you can send one payment to specific merchant who can further sends the payment after keeping his share. For example, you buy a product through a sales rep of an organization. You can arrange a chained payment for this purpose. You will pay to the sales rep and which will be forwarded to the organization’s account after the share of sales rep is deducted.

Force.com PayPal X toolkit is a set of apex classes for accessing API more easily. You can access them through force.com IDE after installing them into your organization. It takes care of transport . It securely manages API credentials. There is a custom object where you store your API credentials. It also supports adaptive accounts. It is easy to access PayPal sandobx sandbox, beta and live environments.
To access it, sign up on X.com. Obtain application ID from MyApps page. Now, create PayPal sandbox test account and signup on  http://developer.paypal.com. Now, Create test accounts for sandbox and obtain API credentials.

Install PayPal X toolkit from code share.

There are sample codes available for every kind of request that PayPal supports.
Now you don’t have to waste your time in writing custom code to integrate PayPal into your system. Just modify the template classes in the toolkit (which is usually the change in API credentials and some other information as required).

More info on this can be found at webinar by salesforce.com.

Some one asked me how to retrieve a list of sObjects in an SF organization using Apex and bind it to a picklist in a VisualForce page.

List of sObjects is returned when you hit the schema of your SF organization. You can get the Label of sObjects as well as API names.

The following code snippet shows how to do the above mentioned task

VisualForce page:

<apex:page controller="Schema2" >
<apex:form >
<apex:SelectList value="{!val}" size="1">
<apex:selectOptions value="{!Name}"></apex:selectOptions>
</apex:SelectList>
</apex:form>
</apex:page>


Apex Controller Code:

public class Schema2 {
public String val {get;set;}
public List<SelectOption> getName()
{
List<Schema.SObjectType> gd = Schema.getGlobalDescribe().Values(); //extracts the List of sObjects in an organization
List<SelectOption> options = new List<SelectOption>();
for(Schema.SObjectType f : gd)
{
options.add(new SelectOption(f.getDescribe().getLabel(), f.getDescribe().getLabel()));
}
return options;
}
}

Feel free to ask any questions

“VMForce: The birth of a new cloud …”. The company’s Salesforce, in conjunction with VMware have created a wonderful and powerful ecosystem that can further enhance the power of the cloud.

In an article published by the initiative entitled VMForce: Why? What? How? mentioned: In simple terms, VMforce is a service that will allow any Java developer to create applications that can run directly in the cloud. VMforce provides Java tools “out-of-the-box” which are already pre-integrated with a relational database, a search machine, analysis tools and reporting, user identity management as well as all construction-related services , implementation and management of enterprise-class applications.

VMforce allows developers to use Spring, Java development environment more popular for the rapid construction of applications and instant installation in a runtime environment for enterprise class cloud. This “Framework” is backed by a division of VMware: SpringSource.

For reference, the graphical development environment based on Eclipse SpringSource, making it even more attached to the world of open standards.

True, the fact is not required to purchase a server and middleware to run applications, but it is also possible by Java2 Enterprise Edition to interact with objects in Salesforce. This will allow developers who already have work done on Salesforce.com Salesforce platform, benefiting in the short, medium and long term of the enormous power of Java.

Who benefits from this? First the developers. Both of those companies that are dedicated to providing its development independently, as those who work within companies.

Secondly, the directors of departments of Information Technology, for now there is no need to buy more hardware, have more physical space, require more electricity and / or cooling to accommodate new applications (or existing).

Thirdly and equally important, the Directors-General and Financial companies, to encourage that with the pattern of “Software as a Service” a substantial saving in investment licensing, maintenance and all expenses incurred while installing database engine , middleware, etc. What about the cost of information storage.

Another advantage worth mentioning again is the fact that it has a Quality Level Agreement that guarantees a 99.9997% of time “up” of the application, being only necessary that the end users using only a browser .

The bottom line? The new cloud is born. A cloud attached to robust and open standards. A cloud that has the experience and support of VMware, Salesforce, Oracle and all that now makes up this thing called VMForce.

VMware and Salesforce.com appear to be launching a virtualization as a service offering based on a teaser Web page posted by the companies.

Details about the effort, dubbed VMforce, are sparse, but the companies promise to “make an exciting joint announcement on the future of cloud computing” on April 27.

VMware CEO Paul Maritz and Salesforce.com chief Marc Benioff will host the powwow. It’s likely the two parties will announce a data center tie up and some sort of virtualization as a service offering.

via ZDNet

Lot of my readers ask questions regarding file attachment  using Web Services in Oracle CRM On Demand.. I had a requirement of attaching a pdf document to a Service Created.

To do this, first of all, you have to fetch the document to be attached, into a byte array.

byte[] byteArray=null;

The next step is to initialize Attachment.

ServiceRequest2.SiebelXmlAttachmentType SiebelXML; //ServiceRequest2 is the namespace that I was using
SiebelXML = new ServiceRequest2.SiebelXmlAttachmentType();
SiebelXML.Value = byteArray; //put the byte array into the attachment value
SiebelXML.AttachmentIsTextData = "false";

Now attach it to a existing service request and update the service request

ServiceRequest2.ServiceRequest1[] SRFileAttach;

I think there is nothing much left to explain after writing the code. I hope it helps to other.

Feel free to consult me if you have any queries/concerns regarding this code or any problem in Oracle CRM on Demand.

I had a requirement of automate a task which could run after every 5 minutes. After spending some time on research, I decided to make a windows service and automate it. Automating a windows service is a bit tricky and it gave me a little hard time. Hence, I am sharing what did I code to complete the task.

When a new service created, OnStart & OnStop methods are initialized by default. You need to play with timers to get the task done.

Below is the code snippet which shows how to automate the windows service.

public partial class Service1

      {
        public Timer tm;  //initialize a new timer instance
        public Service1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
        {
            tm = new Timer();
            tm.AutoReset = true; //timer will reset and call the event handler function itself
            tm.Interval = 60000;  // time interval in milliseconds
            tm.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(timer_start);  //event which needs to be fired

            //once the timer reaches its maximum value
            tm.Start(); //start the timer

        }

protected void timer_start(object sender, ElapsedEventArgs e)

{

    //Perform your task here

}

protected override void OnStop()
        {
            tm.Start(); //start the timer again and it will call the event hander function again
        }

The above mentioned code snippet is self explanatory. I hope it helps whoever reads the post.

Feel free to ask questions

I had a requirement of calling a web page which shows nothing but does some processing at the back end. But later on I decided to put a progress bar to make it attractive. I used JQuery UI to show the progress bar. The issue is JQuery is a javaScript library and it runs after the server side code is done processing. And my code was on the Page_Load method.

The solution which I found was to call the processing page within an iframe of the parent page. So that the progress bar will be shown on the parent page and will be loaded as soon as the page loads and the processing will be done within an iframe.

This is what I did to implement the above scenario:

///////////////Parent Page///////////////
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<iframe id="ifrm" frameborder="0"  runat="server" />
</form>

Code behind of the parent page:
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
ifrm.Attributes["src"] = "Default2.aspx?id=" + Request["id"];
}

This will pass the id in the query string from the parent window the the iframe page. The iframe window will get the id from the query string and will do the desired processing.

Feel free to ask questions