Osama's Weblog

As every one knows, Apple has launched IPAD which is a great gadget as far as portability is concerned. People need to use their business applications to make out most of their time valuable.  After Apple has launched IPAD, it seems to very simple to use salesforce.com in IPAD. People can use it anywhere if internet connectivity is available. Its portable and hence you have your salesforce account in your hands and can use it anywhere.

Thats the advantage of cloud computing. People don’t have to worry about their data and is reachable anywhere. Apple has doubled the value of cloud computing after launching such a device.

More and more cloud solutions need to be developed in order to cater future challenges and once you have such gadgets, its awesome!

Placing a visualforce page on sidebar is really simple.

1) Create a visualforce page.

2) Create a custom  HTML homepage component. Place the following code in the HTML area.

<iframe src="/apex/[PAGE NAME]?core.apexpages.devmode.url=1" width="100%" frameborder="0" height="100"></iframe>

replace [PAGE NAME] your custom page name.

3)Place it on the left side of home page layout.

and here u go…

I was deploying an apex class through Force.com IDE on a production environment. It was continuously giving me an error “An error occurred on your page”. I wasnt getting the message but on some googling I came to know that my class was using many pageReference methods which were returning some page. The problem was pages include the class as their controller and the in the class pages were being called. The deployment method is sequential on force.com IDE which was creating problem.

The pages were not deployed on the production environment and that is why it was giving me the error. I found a solution somehow. What I did was, removed the ‘return page.myPage’ from the class and include ‘return null’. The class was deployed. Then I deployed the pages. After the pages got deployed, I edited the class, replaced the ‘return null’ statement wirh “return page.MyPage”. This requires lot of rework but solved my problem.

Salesforce.com offers encrypted fields to use in standard and objects. Encrypted fields are available by request only.

Encrypted field allows users to enter any combination of letters and numbers and store them in encrypted form.

These fields are used to store private data like passwords and credit card information. There are certain consideration for encrypted fields:

• You cannot implement workflows on encrypted fields.
• Encrypted fields are accessible through apex. That means if you are accessing an encrypted field in apex, it will show un-masked data and not the masked one.
• You can set a maximum length of up to 191 characters.

Salesforce.com offers following masks for encrypted fields:

• Mask all characters
• Last four characters clear
• Credit Card Numbers
• National Insurance Number
• Social Security Number
• Social Insurance Number

Moreover, we can have two kinds of mask characters, ‘X’ and ‘*”.

And finally….I passed Consultant exam as well. The exam was quite different from Administrator exam. It requires extensive knowledge of Customer Support (Cases, Entitlements), Campaigns, Sharing Model and most important you must have knowledge of CRM business processes which include Forecasting etc.

What I observed was that questions were not ‘How’ but ‘Why’ and ‘Which’. There will be many questions in which 2 answers would be perfect but you have to select the recommended one. Here your experience counts. People who have done large CRM implementations can pass the exam in a glimpse.

Feel free to ask questions

I attended a salesforce.com webinar yesterday which was for partners only. There are few things which that need to be noticed.

1)      No Referral Partners: There will be no referral partners from now on. Only Consulting and ISV partners will be called Partners of Salesforce.

2)      Partners can resell as well.

3)      For being a consulting partner, at least one application must be published on AppExchange.

4)      There must be specified number of Force.com Certified Developers for being ISV Application Partner.

5)      Benefits for Consulting Partners:

a)      Free online training of every new release of Salesforce.com

b)      Certification Training: It will be done online and with nominal charges of US$ 690.00 only (For consulting partners only).

Have you ever made a custom logic to run an apex class or method synchronously? It is possible by using time based workflow and field updates and then call a trigger. But salesforce has simplify this thing by introducing Apex Scheduler which can run an apex class synchronously.

system.schedule(String JobName,String CronExpression,Object schedulable_class) does this work

Suppose there is a class called SchCls which needs to be scheduled. Make an object of the class and schedule it.

SchCls m = new SchCls();

String sch = ’20 30 8 10 2 *’;

system.schedule(‘Merge Job’, sch, m);

The CronExpression is the time when to schedule the job. It represents the time and date in following way:

Seconds Minutes Hours Day_of_month Month Day_of_week optional_year

Rest of the schedule method properties can be found here.

Ever implemented an image uploading related to a record? You must have uploaded to documents first and then called it in a formula field. But you don’t have to get into this mess now. Because Salesforce is releasing Rich Text Mode in its Spring’10 release.

The new rich text mode will be the data type in the for a field which will allow you to add up to 32kB of data in it. You can format your text in it as well as upload an image in it.  By format, I mean you can make the characters bold, italic, numbering etc. Its a great feature!

Here is what salesforce says about this

• Richly format your data by bolding, italicizing, underlining text or by   adding bulleted or numbered lists
• Easily link to data on the internet with hyperlinks
• Display multimedia content such as images

Below are the images which demonstrates this feature.

In the first image, the highlighted one is the data type at the time of field selection and in the second image Descriptions is the field whose data type is Rich Text Mode.

Isnt it great???

Salesforce is growing faster. They are there to satisfy there customers and developers. Salesforce, in its Spring’10 release, is introducing Multilevel-Master Detail Relationships. This is an idea which was discussed in salesforce ideas community.

With multi-level relationship you can:

• Create complex data models with linked master-detail relationships
• Create reports with data from all levels of your complex data model
• Perform cascading deletes when the master record is deleted—removing the need to delete “orphaned” subdetail records
• Include line-item records that reside in the subdetail objects in roll-up mathematical calculations
• Define custom report types that use data across the multilevel master-detail relationship

The relationship under discussion will create a sub-detail relationship with the detail object.

Master –> Detail –> Sub-detail

Suppose I have an object Account, its detail object Order and a sub-detail object called Order Line items. They are related this way:

Account –> Order –> Order Line

In previous versions, the detail object couldnt be a master for anyother object. But after this release, we can say that the detail object could be a master for sub-detail object. But still, the detail or sub-detail object can not be a master of any other master-detail relationship.

There are certain considerations for this kind of relationship as follows:

• When a master record is deleted, the related detail and subdetail records are also deleted. This means when an account is deleted, its related orders and order line items will also be deleted. This also means if an order is deleted, its order line items will be deleted.
• The Owner field on the detail and subdetail records is not available and is automatically set to the owner of the master record. Custom objects on the “detail” side of a master-detail relationship cannot have sharing rules, manual sharing, or queues, as these require the Owner field.
• The security settings for the master record control the detail and subdetail records.
• The master-detail relationship field (which is the field linking the objects) is required on the page layout of the detail and subdetail records.
• The master object can be a standard object, such as Account or Opportunity, or a custom object.

• Upto three custom detail levels are allowed.

• Standard objects cannot be on the detail side of a custom object in a master-detail relationship, because they have owner field.

• You cannot create a master-detail relationship if the custom object already contains data. You can, however, create the relationship as a lookup and then convert it to master-detail if the lookup field in all records contains a value.

•Roll-up summary fields work as in two-object master-detail relationships. A master can roll up fields on detail records;however, it cannot directly roll up fields on subdetail records.To achieve this, the detail record must have a roll-up summary field for the field on the subdetail record, allowing the master to roll up from the detail’s roll-up summary field.

•You cannot delete a custom object if it is on the master side of a master-detail relationship.

• Undeleting the master record also undeletes detail and subdetail records.

These  are just a few considerations. Rest of them can be found in spring ‘ 10 release notes. I am just wondering how simple would business processes be after this functionality.  Salesforce is also introducing Quote as a standard object and there is a Quote Line Item object as its Detail I guess. Making another sub-detail object with Line item will improve the business process.

My client purchased an application from AppExchange to achieve this thing. But I wish if could have waited a little. This is freaking awesome. Wow!!

Feel free to ask questions.

There is a really good example of invoking apex code through apex code here. But I have found another way to invoke the apex method without using visualforce pages.

This is how I did:

1) Suppose you want to place a button on the Account detail  page to call apex method. Clone the Account detail page by creating a new visualforce page.
<apex:page standardController=”Account” extensions=”newCOn” >
<apex:form >

<apex:commandButton value=”Convert” action=”{!getID}” ></apex:commandButton>
<apex:detail relatedList=”true” relatedListHover=”true” />
</apex:form>
</apex:page>
2) Create the method getID() in the extension class that has been defined above.
public class newCon()
{
public void getID()
{
//make your custom logic here
}
}
3) Override this page on VIEW page under Setup>Customize>Accounts.

And in this way you have called an apex method without redirecting it to another visualforce page.

Feel free to ask questions.