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Advanced reporting and Dashboards in Salesforce: Google Visualization with Visualforce

2012-02-09T15:35:00.000-08:00

If you haven't yet tried your hand with Google Visualization API's this is the best time to start...

Here is the link to the documentation to get started .. http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/docs/reference.html

A very cool feature of this is you could generate charts just by passing parameters in the URL.

It's as simple as this, click the link https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=p3&chs=450x100&chd=t:30,20,20,15,15&chl=Open|In Progress|On Hold|Pending Confirmation|Closed

As you can see, the values in PINK color are the actual segments of the chart. You may split the entire 100% as per your req, and the text in GREEN is the value for each of the segments.
<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>
How can i use this?

Well, you could just embed this into a Standard Page Layout using just a formula field. So, you get a real time snapshot right inside your detail page.

Also, you could do some complex calculations in your apex class and pass the results of the calculation to the URL as parameters and you have a nice little graph.

Refer to the documentation for more samples and chart types. http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/docs/reference.html

Salesforce List (Array) :How to Find the MAX value in a list

2012-02-08T16:45:00.000-08:00

This is just a way that i followed, not sure if LIST's have a pre-defined function to find out the maximum... If you do find a easier way, share it in the comments box below.

Here, "samplevalues" is a LIST of Decimal's

List<Decimal> samplevalues = new List<Decimal>();
samplevalues.add(55.0);
samplevalues.add(75.5);
samplevalues.add(99.3);
Decimal maxvalue = samplevalues[0];
        For (integer i =0;i<samplevalues.size();i++)
        {
            
            if( samplevalues[i] > maxvalue)
                maxvalue = samplevalues[i];             
        }    
system.debug('the max value is'+maxvalue);

Upload Contacts from CSV file in a Visualforce Page - Source: Ranjeet Singh

2012-01-24T11:27:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to Mr.Ranjeet Singh for submitting this article. This article is a sample code which lets you upload contacts from a Visualforce Page using a CSV file...

Click here if you too would like to submit an article for this blog

Step 1:

1) Create the Apex Class: UploadRecordUsingCSVContact

public with sharing class UploadRecordUsingCSVContact {
    
    public Blob FileRecords{get;set;}
    String[] LineNo=new String[]{};
    List<Contact> AllContact;
    Public Pagereference UploadFile()
     {
       String FileData=FileRecords.toString();
       LineNo=FileData.split('\n');
       Allcontact=new List<Contact>();
       for(Integer i=1;i<LineNo.size();i++)
        {
          Contact con=new Contact();
          String[] ActualData=new String[]{};
          ActualData=LineNo[i].split(',');
          con.FirstName=ActualData[0];
          con.LastName=ActualData[1];
          con.Email=ActualData[2];
          con.Phone=ActualData[3];
          Allcontact.add(con);
        }
       try
       {
         insert Allcontact;
       } 
       catch(Exception e) 
        {
        
        }
       return Null;
     }

Step 2: Create VF Page: UploadRecordUsingCSVContact

<apex:page controller="UploadRecordUsingCSVContact" >
 <apex:form >
  <apex:sectionHeader title="Upload Contact Records uing CSV File"/>
  <apex:pageblock >
    <Center>
        <apex:inputfile value="{!FileRecords}"></apex:inputfile><apex:commandButton value="Upload File" action="{!UploadFile}"/><br/><br/>
        <font color="Red"><b>Note:&nbsp;<a href="{!$Resource.ContactUploadTemplate}" target="__blank">Click Here </a>To download the Format.</b></font>
    </Center>
  </apex:pageblock> 
 </apex:form>
</apex:page>

Step 3: Create a CSV File and the file must be in the following mentioned Format:

First Name	Last Name	Email	Phone
Ranjeet	Singh	xxxxx@gmail.com	xxxxxxx

JAVA to Salesforce.com Integration using webservices - Easy implementation Guide

2011-12-17T20:49:00.000-08:00

I wanted to do this for a long time, but the complexity involved in the process made me lazy. I finally went through the process and successfully wrote a small java program to connect to salesforce.com and fetch the contacts.

I had to browse through multiple articles to troubleshoot and understand issues, which was a bit frustrating at times. So, i put together all the steps for you in a presentation.

If you are new to webservices and JAVA, you may want to try this out. This should approximately take a few hours for you to complete.

You can view the slideshare presentation here. You may also download it and use, please make sure you acknowledge forcetree.com when you re-distribute.

Forcetree.com writing a java program to connect to sfdc

View more presentations from Edwin Vijay R

You can also download the entire presentation including the embedded videos here.
Download entire presentation

insufficient_access_on_cross_reference_entity APEX / Salesforce

2011-12-09T16:23:00.000-08:00

Even though i understood what this means and have dealt with it earlier, this time this error message sucked my brain for one week. Finally, i got it sorted out and i hope this post helps someone understand and solve as well.

When does this error happen?

This error normally happens when a DML operation is performed. Meaning that, whenever an Insert or Update is performed. You won't see this error when you save your APEX class or TRIGGER, because this error happens at RUNTIME.

What does this error mean?

This error means that you are trying to do an operation which is not supposed to be done, or the operation you are about to perform is not permitted according to the Sharing and Security settings defined. This error message does NOT always mean that you lack access to do the operation, even though it might be the case sometimes. So, even if you are an ADMINISTRATOR you may get this message.

Possible Causes:

Let's take some scenario's and analyze.

 Scenario 1:  Creating a new record (Account/Contact/...) and setting the Owner. Applies to updating records as well.

So, in your code you create some records. By Default the creator of the record is the Owner. You want to change this and you modify the OwnerId column of the newly created records. You make "User X" as the Owner. Now when you run the code, you get the Error below:

System.DmlException: Insert failed. First exception on row 2; first error: INSUFFICIENT_ACCESS_ON_CROSS_REFERENCE_ENTITY, insufficient access rights on cross-reference id: []

Things to check:

  *Check that the running user (in this case you) has access to the object being operated. Check that he has CREATE privileges on the object. This is optional, but is always better to start from here. 

  *Check that the Owner ie User X has CREATE permission on the object. Check that his profile has the CREATE permission on the particular object. He might not be having it, grant him permission and the issue is resolved.

 Scenario 2:

Creating or Updating an Opportunity (just for an example,  might be any object). Setting the related Account of the Opportunity.

So, let's say that you create 5 Opportunities and you set the Owner to "User X". You set the Account to "Account X". When your code tries to insert these 5 opportunities, it fails and you get the same error message.

System.DmlException: Insert failed. First exception on row 2; first error: INSUFFICIENT_ACCESS_ON_CROSS_REFERENCE_ENTITY, insufficient access rights on cross-reference id: []

Reason:

This is because "User X" does not have access to "Account X". When you try to create an Opportunity for "Account X" that he does not have access to the code fails. Either grant access to "User X" for "Account X" manually or through code and then do the Insert.

Scenario 3:

The Sharing Object.

This is a bit complex to get at. atleast for me. You might be aware that every object has its own Share object. So, Account has AccountShare and Customobj__c has Customobj__Share

When you insert or update records in this object you might receive the same error message. There are a number of reasons for this to happen. 

    *If you are trying to share "Record X" with "User Y" and you yourself do not have access to "Record x", this error happens.

    *If you are trying to share "Record X" with "User Y" and "User Y" does not have access to the object (the profile level permission, create read edit delete), this error happens.

    *If you are trying to share "Record X" with "User Y" and "User Y" already has access to "Record X" this error happens. 

SF Uploadify - A cool way to upload multiple files in Salesforce

2011-09-23T16:17:00.000-07:00

SF Uploadify is a solution developed by Aslam Bari. Simply Cool and interesting.

Here is a small screencast of how the tool works - http://screencast.com/t/ibDqgMBbfQ

You can check his blog for more information about this tool in the links below:

http://techsahre.blogspot.com/2011/09/sf-uploadify-file-uploading-utility-for.html

http://www.aslambari.com/sf_uploadify.html

Radiobutton in a Datatable in Visualforce Page

2011-09-16T21:21:00.000-07:00

As the title of the article implies, in this post we will be seeing an example which uses radio button in a table in visualforce and allows selecting one of the records in the table.

You can see a demo of the example here - Click here (forcetreedemos)

Visualforce Page:

<apex:page controller="RadioButton" showheader="false">
<apex:form>
<apex:pageblock id="allcons" title="Available Contacts">
               <apex:pageblocktable id="allcons" value="{!AllContacts}" var="allcon">
                    <apex:column headervalue="Set as Primary">                    
                       <apex:actionsupport action="{!selectcon}" event="onclick" rerender="consel,allcons">  
                        <input type="radio" />                    
                            <apex:param name="conid" value="{!allcon.Id}">
                        </apex:param></apex:actionsupport>                            
                    </apex:column>    
                    <apex:column headervalue="Last Name">
                        <apex:outputfield value="{!allcon.LastName}">
                    </apex:outputfield></apex:column> 
                    <apex:column headervalue="First Name">
                        <apex:outputfield value="{!allcon.FirstName}">
                    </apex:outputfield></apex:column>  
                    <apex:column headervalue="Email">
                        <apex:outputfield value="{!allcon.Email}">
                    </apex:outputfield></apex:column>  
                    <apex:column headervalue="Phone">
                        <apex:outputfield value="{!allcon.Phone}">
                    </apex:outputfield></apex:column>  
                </apex:pageblocktable>
</apex:pageblock> 
<apex:pageblock id="consel" title="Selected Contact">
            <apex:pageblocktable id="allcons" value="{!selectedContact}" var="selcon">                       
                    <apex:column headervalue="Last Name">
                        <apex:outputfield value="{!selcon.LastName}">
                    </apex:outputfield></apex:column> 
                    <apex:column headervalue="First Name">
                        <apex:outputfield value="{!selcon.FirstName}">
                    </apex:outputfield></apex:column>  
                    <apex:column headervalue="Email">
                        <apex:outputfield value="{!selcon.Email}">
                    </apex:outputfield></apex:column>  
                    <apex:column headervalue="Phone">
                        <apex:outputfield value="{!selcon.Phone}">
                    </apex:outputfield></apex:column>  
                </apex:pageblocktable>
</apex:pageblock>               
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

Apex Class: RadioButton

public class RadioButton {
List<contact> selectcon;
Public List<contact> getAllContacts()
{
    List<contact> allcons = [Select Id,FirstName,LastName,Email,Phone from Contact limit 5];
    return allcons;
}    
Public void selectcon()
{
    String selcontactid = System.currentPagereference().getParameters().get('conid');
    Contact con = [Select Id,FirstName,LastName,Email,Phone from Contact where Id=:selcontactid];
    selectcon =  new List<contact>();
    selectcon.add(con);
}
Public List<contact> getselectedContact()
{
    return selectcon;
}
}

How to embed Chatter in a Visualforce page or as a sidebar component?

2011-09-16T15:44:00.000-07:00

This Winter 11, there is a new chatter component which allows you to embed chatter feeds in a Visualforce page.

Here is the official release notes and further details. Click here

Here is a sample visualforce page using this component. This page displays the feeds for the current logged in user.

<apex:page >
  <chatter:feed entityId="{!$User.Id}"/>
</apex:page>

Note that the "entityID" attribute determines the feeds to be displayed. This can be a UserId, a custom or standard object record ID provided chatter is enabled for that object.

You may also create a Visualforce page with this component, and then create a home page sidebar component and embed the Visualforce page in the sidebar component.

How to fetch page paramters directly in Visualforce Page?

2011-09-16T15:26:00.000-07:00

A previous post describes how to pass paramters to a Visualforce page, and fetch the passed parameter values in your Apex Class(controller). Click here to read the post.

In this article we will see how to fetch the paramter value directly in your Visualforce page instead of getting it from the Apex Class(controller).

{!$CurrentPage.parameters.paramtername}

This global variable provides the capability.

Let's see a small visualforce example to see how it works.

<apex:page>
  The value of the paramter name passed to this page is :{!$CurrentPage.parameters.name} 
</apex:page>

Save the above Visualforce page with the name "testpage".

Now, go to the URL bar and type the following address

http://yourinstance.salesforce.com/apex/testpage?name=Edwin

Your Visualforce page will display the output "

The value of the paramter name passed to this page is : Edwin

You can use the apex:param component when you want to pass paramters dynamically between visualforce pages, and the above method works as usual.

Implementing styles and CSS in Visualforce Pages

2011-09-01T00:16:00.000-07:00

This is a step by step guide which takes you through getting started with using styles and CSS in your Visualforce Pages.

Visualforce css developer guide(by forcetree.com)

View more presentations from Edwin Vijay R

General Query Utility - using Dynamic SOQL

2011-08-10T22:14:00.000-07:00

This sample code covers a general query utility which can be used to query any object.

This is the general class which runs the query. Comments are embedded inline for understanding the functionality.

Copy and paste this class

Public class QueryUtility

{

    // Function to run the query

    Public List<sObject> runQuery(String objname,String[] fieldnames,String condition)

    {

        List<sObject> queryresult;

        String fieldslist = '';

        // Generate the fieldslist from the string array

        if (fieldnames != NULL)

        {

            if(fieldnames.size() > 0)

            {

                for (Integer i=0; i < fieldnames.size(); i++)

                {

                    if( i <= (fieldnames.size() - 2))

                        fieldslist = fieldslist+fieldnames[i]+',';

                    else

                        fieldslist = fieldslist+fieldnames[i];    

                }

            }

        } 

        // Construct the query string

        String soqlquery = 'Select '+fieldslist+' from '+objname+' '+condition;

        // Run the query

        queryresult = Database.query(soqlquery);

        return queryresult;               

    }

}

To Call this class:

You can call this class from any other class. Below is a sample code which you can embed into any class or you can execute this from the system log.

// Construct the list of fields

     String[] flist  = new List<String>{'Name','Id'};

// Initialte a new variable of the general utility class

     QueryUtility test = new QueryUtility();

// Call the runquery method to execute the query. Note that the condition has to be passed as an empty string if you do not have any condition

     Account[] qresult = test.runQuery('Account',flist,'');

     system.debug('The query result is'+qresult);

Poll Component for Salesforce

2011-07-27T23:19:00.000-07:00

This article covers a sample code to insert a poll component into your Salesforce.com instance as a home page component, or elsewhere Visualforce is supported.

This component allows administrators to open up a simple poll for users to get feedback from users. Once installed, the poll component can be configured easily.

Below is a demo of the application. Note that the below is an iframe of a Force.com Site page, Yes, it's a visualforce page embedded within this blog.

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>
You can watch the demo at forcetreedemos too..

To install the app in your Salesforce instance, install the below package.

Production, Developer Org - https://login.salesforce.com/packaging/installPackage.apexp?p0=04t900000000sla

Sandbox - https://test.salesforce.com/packaging/installPackage.apexp?p0=04t900000000sla

Suggestions and Comments welcome!

A Guide to writing Test Methods for an Apex Class in Salesforce - Part 2

2011-06-23T15:36:00.000-07:00

The Basic - Getting Started

Let's start by considering a simple apex class.

Public class mysimpleclass
{
    Public void samplemethod()
    {
        Integer a = 10;
        Integer b = a + 20;
        system.debug('The value of b is'+b);
    }
   
}

Now, we shall write the test method for this class.

Step 1: You have two options. You can have the test method in the same class above, OR you can have a separate class which has the test method for the above class. I always go with a separate class, because

It is easy to organize.
Make use of @istest notation to prevent the test class from being counted against the organization apex code limit. Remeber, comments and classes with @istest notation are not counted.

Create a new apex class as below. Please note that this is the basic standard for any test class.

@istest
private class mysimpleclass_TestMethod // Name of the test class, Can be any name
{         
    static testmethod void mysimpleclass_TestMethod()   // Name of the test method. Must be the same as the class name 
    {
        mysimpleclass testcls = new mysimpleclass();   // Initialize variable for original class 
        testcls.samplemethod();                        // Call Function of Original class
    }    
}

Step 2: Save the class and click on the "Run Test" button as shown below.

Step 3: You will see the screen shown below.

As you can see, the test method coverage is 100%, meaning that all lines of the apex class have been covered.

Now, click on the "100" link highlighted in the "Code Coverage" section as shown above.
You will see the screen shown below..

A Blue color denotes - CODE COVERED
A RED color denotes - CODE NOT COVERED
Since our code coverage is 100% we do not have any red lines.

Pointing your Blackberry Smartphone / Simulator to the Sandbox

2011-05-06T15:59:00.000-07:00

I have done this before and ran into the same problem again recently. Before I forget this again, let me write it down just in case there are people who think like me.

So, it was just one letter which cost me 1 to 2 hours of research.

To point your Blackberry Device or your Blackberry Simulator to the Sandbox, you will have to do the steps as outlined in this article by Salesforce. Click here

I did exactly (rather not), what was told there and i couldn't point by Blackberry to the Sandbox. After two hours i found out what was wrong.

I typed in, Izsand (ie, a Capital I ( a I as in Ice) and then zsand).

It should have been lzsand (ie, a small l as in lazy and then zsand).

Probably I should go back and learn alphabets properly.

Tree View in a Visualforce Page... Accounts/Contacts/Cases in a single view

2011-04-29T16:13:00.000-07:00

This article would cover steps to create a Visualforce Page which outputs a tree like structure wherein you could view Accounts, the Contacts related to the account and the Cases related to the Contact - All in one single tree structure.

Watch a DEMO here.....

Screenshot:

Step 1:

Download the Jquery Plugin from here. Upload this Zip file into Static Resources with the name "Jtreeview"

Step 2:

Create the Apex Class "treenodes" and paste the below code.

public class treenodes {

/* Wrapper class to contain the nodes and their children */
public class cNodes
{

 public List<Contact> parent {get; set;}
 Public Account gparent {get;set;}

 public cNodes(Account  gp, List<Contact> p)
 {
     parent = p;
     gparent = gp;
 }
}
/* end of Wrapper class */ 

Public List<cNodes> hierarchy;

Public List<cNodes> getmainnodes()
{
    hierarchy = new List<cNodes>();
    List<Account> tempparent = [Select Id,Name from Account];
    for (Integer i =0; i< tempparent.size() ; i++)
    {
        List<Contact> tempchildren = [Select Id,FirstName,LastName,(Select Id,CaseNumber,Subject from Cases) from Contact where AccountId = :tempparent[i].Id];
        hierarchy.add(new cNodes(tempparent[i],tempchildren));
     }   
    return hierarchy;
}   
}

Step 3:

Create a Visualforce Page "TreeViewDemo" and paste the below code.

<apex:page sidebar="false" controller="treenodes" showheader="false">
<!-- Include the Jquery Script files -->
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{!URLFOR($Resource.Jtreeview,'Jquerytreeview/jquery.treeview.css')}"/>
    <script src="{!URLFOR($Resource.Jtreeview,'Jquerytreeview/jquery.js')}" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script src="{!URLFOR($Resource.Jtreeview,'Jquerytreeview/jquery.cookie.js')}" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script src="{!URLFOR($Resource.Jtreeview,'Jquerytreeview/jquery.treeview.js')}" type="text/javascript"></script>
<!-- End of Javascript files -->
<script type="text/javascript">
        $(function() {
            $("#tree").treeview({
                collapsed: false,
                animated: "medium",
                control:"#sidetreecontrol",
                persist: "location"
            });
        })
</script>
<br/> <br/> <br/>
<!-- Tree -->
<div class="treeheader" style="height:0px;">&nbsp;</div>
<div id="sidetreecontrol"><a href="?#"><font style="color:blue;">Collapse All</font></a> | <a href="?#"><font style="color:blue;">Expand All</font></a></div>
<ul id="tree">
    <apex:repeat value="{!mainnodes}" var="parent">
        <li><strong><apex:outputtext style="color:blue;" escape="false" value="{!parent.gparent.Name}"/></strong>
             <ul>
                 <apex:repeat value="{!parent.parent}" var="child">
                    <li><span class="formattextcon"><apex:outputtext style="color:green;" escape="false" value="{!child.LastName}"/></span>
                        <ul>
                            <apex:repeat value="{!child.Cases}" var="gchildren">
                               <li> <span class="formattextcon"> <apex:outputtext escape="false" style="color:red;" value="{!gchildren.CaseNumber}"/> <b>||</b> &nbsp;<apex:outputtext escape="false" value="{!gchildren.Subject}"/> </span> </li>
                            </apex:repeat>
                        </ul>       
                    </li>
                 </apex:repeat>  
             </ul>  
        </li>
    </apex:repeat>
</ul>
<!-- End of Tree -->       
</apex:page>

Note: You may modify the hierarchy by replacing the Objects and the queries with your required ones. Also, you may have to optimize the apex class to handle more than 100 queries as this demo has a SOQL query within a FOR loop (An Example of bad programming practice).

Incident and Timesheet Management for Salesforce

2011-04-21T15:42:00.000-07:00

I have put together a small application which helps log tickets, and track them. This application was specifically designed keeping in mind the way tickets/incidents are handled in a typical IT Service Desk.

This tool also has a timesheet feature, which logs the amount of work spent by each employee on each ticket.

Watch a working Demo of the tool here....@ forcetreedemos

Timesheet Management - Click here

Incident Management - Click here

Below are some of the screenshots from this tool. You can install the package from here.

To install to Production/Developer instance : https://login.salesforce.com/?startURL=%2Fpackaging%2FinstallPackage.apexp%3Fp0%3D04t900000000mDE

To install to your Sandbox: https://test.salesforce.com/?startURL=%2Fpackaging%2FinstallPackage.apexp%3Fp0%3D04t900000000mDE

Screenshots:

iGoogle like Homepage for Salesforce

2011-03-15T15:35:00.000-07:00

While there is already an "Idea Under Construction" for a customizable homepage here, you may still want to look at the below application.

This excellent app has been developed by Kusiri and is called iSalesforce.

The source code can be downloaded from here. Here is the video from the app's code share page.

Dashboards in Visualforce Page - A Cool Way!!

2011-03-15T15:24:00.000-07:00

What if you wanted to display a dashboard in a Visualforce Page, or what if you do not like the standard dashboard's of Salesforce and wanted to create new dashboard's.

This article shows an example of displaying dashboard's in a Visualforce page using JQuery Flot.

JQuery Flot is an open source Jquery Plugin which can be downloaded from here.The link has proper documentation and the various ways of using Flot.

You can watch a demo in action here.

Screenshot:

Step 1:

Get the Jquery Flot ZIP file from here. Make sure that you download the latest version when available. This example was tested with Flot version 0.6.

Step 2:

Upload the ZIP file just downloaded into Static Resource. Let's Name the Static Resource "FlotDashboard". You may rename it to a meaningful name if you like to.

Step 3:

Let's create a Visualforce Page to see how the dashboard works.

<apex:page showheader="false">
 
<html>
 <head>
  
    <title>Flot Examples</title>
     <link href="{!URLFOR($Resource.FlotDashboard,'flot/examples/layout.css')}" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"></link>
    <!--[if IE]><script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="{!URLFOR($Resource.FlotDashboard,'flot/excanvas.min.js')}"></script><![endif]-->
    <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="{!URLFOR($Resource.FlotDashboard,'flot/jquery.js')}"></script>
    <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="{!URLFOR($Resource.FlotDashboard,'flot/jquery.flot.js')}"></script>
    <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="{!URLFOR($Resource.FlotDashboard,'flot/jquery.flot.stack.js')}"></script>
 </head>
    <body>
    <h1>Flot Examples</h1>

    <div id="placeholder" style="width:600px;height:300px"></div>

    <p>One of the goals of Flot is to support user interactions. Try
    pointing and clicking on the points.</p>

    <p id="hoverdata">Mouse hovers at
    (<span id="x">0</span>, <span id="y">0</span>). <span id="clickdata"></span></p>

    <p>A tooltip is easy to build with a bit of jQuery code and the
    data returned from the plot.</p>

    <p><input id="enableTooltip" type="checkbox"/>Enable tooltip</p>

<script id="source" language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
$(function () {
    var sin = [], cos = [];
    for (var i = 0; i < 14; i += 0.5) {
        sin.push([i, Math.sin(i)]);
        cos.push([i, Math.cos(i)]);
    }

    var plot = $.plot($("#placeholder"),
           [ { data: sin, label: "sin(x)"}, { data: cos, label: "cos(x)" } ], {
               series: {
                   lines: { show: true },
                   points: { show: true }
               },
               grid: { hoverable: true, clickable: true },
               yaxis: { min: -1.2, max: 1.2 }
             });

    function showTooltip(x, y, contents) {
        $('<div id="tooltip">' + contents + '</div>').css( {
            position: 'absolute',
            display: 'none',
            top: y + 5,
            left: x + 5,
            border: '1px solid #fdd',
            padding: '2px',
            'background-color': '#fee',
            opacity: 0.80
        }).appendTo("body").fadeIn(200);
    }

    var previousPoint = null;
    $("#placeholder").bind("plothover", function (event, pos, item) {
        $("#x").text(pos.x.toFixed(2));
        $("#y").text(pos.y.toFixed(2));

        if ($("#enableTooltip:checked").length > 0) {
            if (item) {
                if (previousPoint != item.datapoint) {
                    previousPoint = item.datapoint;
                   
                    $("#tooltip").remove();
                    var x = item.datapoint[0].toFixed(2),
                        y = item.datapoint[1].toFixed(2);
                   
                    showTooltip(item.pageX, item.pageY,
                                item.series.label + " of " + x + " = " + y);
                }
            }
            else {
                $("#tooltip").remove();
                previousPoint = null;           
            }
        }
    });

    $("#placeholder").bind("plotclick", function (event, pos, item) {
        if (item) {
            $("#clickdata").text("You clicked point " + item.dataIndex + " in " + item.series.label + ".");
            plot.highlight(item.series, item.datapoint);
        }
    });
});
</script>

 </body>
</html>

</apex:page>

Step 4:

Modify the script above to plot your own values in the dashboard. You can also compute your data points in an apex class and pass them to the dashboard.

I will try and post a more elaborate example of customizing this Dashboard using Apex.

Upload a file as an Attachment to a record using Visualforce

2011-02-12T23:10:00.000-08:00

This example illustrates the way to upload a file and attach it against any record using Visualforce. The file that you upload using this will be available in the "Notes & Attachments" related list for the record.

Click here if you are looking to upload a file into "Documents".

Step 1: Create an Apex class named "attachmentsample" . Paste the code below.

public class attachmentsample {

    public attachmentsample(ApexPages.StandardController controller) {

    }
    Public Attachment myfile;
    Public Attachment getmyfile()
    {
        myfile = new Attachment();
        return myfile;
    }
   
    Public Pagereference Savedoc()
    {
        String accid = System.currentPagereference().getParameters().get('id');

        Attachment a = new Attachment(parentId = accid, name=myfile.name, body = myfile.body);
         
         /* insert the attachment */
         insert a;
        return NULL;
    }   

}

Step 2:

Create a Visualforce page named "attachment" and paste the code below.

<apex:page standardController="Account" extensions="attachmentsample">

<apex:form >
  <apex:sectionHeader title="Upload a Attachment into Salesforce"/>
  <apex:pageblock >
      <apex:pageblocksection columns="1">
          <apex:inputfile value="{!myfile.body}" filename="{!myfile.Name}" />
          <apex:commandbutton value="Save" action="{!Savedoc}"/>
      </apex:pageblocksection>
  </apex:pageblock>   
</apex:form> 

</apex:page>

Quick Test:
If you do not wish to do Step3 and 4 do this. Paste the following URL in your browser
http://yoursalesforceinstance.com/apex/attachment?id=0017000000eiDgy

ID should be a Valid Account Id of your instance.

Step 3:
Create a custom button (Detail Page button) on Account and select the new Visualforce page that you created as the source.

Step4:
Add the button created in Step3 to the Account Page layout.

You can test this by navigating to any account and clicking on the button that you created in Step3.
You may test

Chatter SuperBowl Ads

2011-02-10T11:19:00.000-08:00

Came across these excellent Ad's and the making of these Ad's.Watch and have fun!!!

The Making of these Ad's

Rich Text fields and Rerender

2011-01-28T16:35:00.000-08:00

You might be knowing that there is a field type called "Rich Text Field". This field allows you to format the text that you enter, add a URL, Insert pictures etc. It looks mostly like a big textbox with a editing toolbar at the top of the textbox. This is how a rich text field looks like.

The number of visible lines (the value that you specify while creating the field or editing it at Setup -> Object -> Field) controls the height of this field in a Visualforce Page. You may also use the style attribute to define your own height.

Rerender

Rich Text fields do not work with rerender. So, if you say that you have a button "Add another box", and clicking on this would rerender the panel and add one more rich text field, then this wont work. You will have to remove the "rerender" attribute and it works.

You should not have the "immediate=true" attribute as well on the commandbutton. This causes the value of the existing rich text fields to be lost.

So, if you have a button in a page which adds more "Rich Text Fields" or does some other rerendering, remove all the rerenderings and do a full page refresh. If you still face issues, remove the "immediate=true" attribute and try again.

A Guide to writing Test Methods for an Apex Class in Salesforce - Part 1

2011-01-27T16:28:00.000-08:00

Whenever you create an Apex Class (in Visualforce terms it may be called a controller or an extension), and when you want to move your Apex Class to production it is necessary that you have a Test Method for your Apex Class. Moreover, the test coverage for your Apex Class should be NOT less than 75%.

Why is this and What's the need???

Unit test methods as it is also called, is in place to ensure that your apex code does not cause any undesired results in your production instance. A Unit Test method can be imagined of a Test script wherein you feed sample data and execute your Apex Class against the sample data. When you do so, you come to know the situations in which your Apex Class could fail or produce undesired results.

Imagine you have an Apex Class which performs something like outlined in the Flow Diagram below.

In such a case, your Test Method will first give the sample value (a =3, b=2) and run the Apex Class. This time you cover the "Yes" branching. The second time you will give the value ( a =2, b =3). This time you cover the "No" branching. Now, you have given sample data such that it covers both outcomes of a condition.

This concept is called "Apex Test Coverage". Now, that you have given sample data twice and covered both outcomes your test coverage would be 100%. Had you given only one set of sample values, your test coverage would be 50%.

The Need:

Salesforce wants you to ensure that the Apex Code that you deploy to your production instance will not cause any unexpected behavior to you as well as to the them. That's the simple reason behind this. Writing test methods becomes frustrating at times, but still you will have to do it.

Note: Part 2 to be published soon.

Uploading a Document into Salesforce using Visualforce

2011-01-12T15:27:00.000-08:00

In this article we will be understanding the procedure to upload a file into "Documents" using a Visualforce Page. You can upload a file and save it as an attachment against a record i believe, but i am not sure how to do this. Hence, this topic would only cover uploading a file to "Documents" under a folder you desire.

I actually had to upload a file against a record. I uploaded the file into Documents, and then stored the reference of the file as a Field in the record. This way i can access the document from the record directly at a later point.

<apex:inputfile> is the tag that is used to upload a file.

Code Sample:

Create the following Visualforce Page

<apex:page controller="UploadDoc">
<apex:form>
  <apex:sectionHeader title="Upload a Document into Salesforce"/>
  <apex:pageblock>
      <apex:pageblocksection columns="1">
          <apex:inputfile value="{!myimage.body}" filename="{!myimage.Name}" />
          <apex:commandbutton value="Save" action="{!Savedoc}"/>
      </apex:pageblocksection>
  </apex:pageblock>   
</apex:form> 
</apex:page>

The controller would be named "UploadDoc" and will have the following code

public class UploadDoc
{
Public Document mydoc;
    Public Document getmyimage()
    {
        mydoc = new Document();
        return mydoc;
    }
   
    Public Pagereference Savedoc()
    {
        mydoc.folderid = UserInfo.getUserId(); // Stores in the currennt users "My Personal Documents" folder
        //mydoc.folderid = 'any other id you want here'; // Fetch Id dynamically by using [Select Id from Folder where Name='My Images']. Specifying a FolderId is mandatory
        insert mydoc;
        return NULL;
    }   
       
       
}

501 Certification

2010-12-30T13:48:00.000-08:00

Long time since i wrote something in this website. I have also not been able to publish "A tip A day" regularly, it was because i had to switch my workplace to a new country. Things have settled down now and i hope to concentrate on posting good articles here..

I took my 501 certification recently and could not clear it. The questions were not too difficult, nor were they too easy. Most questions were tricky.

Forcecertified.com is a good website where you can find a lot of resources. You even have links to recorded podcasts training sessions here. If you are going to take the certification, then make sure you visit this site.

Happy New Year!!!

A Tip a day

2010-12-01T08:36:00.000-08:00

I just got his thought and wanted to give it a try. How about sharing a tip about Salesforce everyday?? Sounds good rite??

OK, so i have started to do it and just published the first tip on my blog Click here ...

Do check it out regularly and forgive me if i don't publish a tip daily (sometimes maybe once in two days or so :))

Updated - Link within this blog

Animation / Text Effects in a Visualforce Page

2010-11-15T23:35:00.000-08:00

It may be required sometimes that you add some animation effects to messages displayed in your homepage or elsewhere, particularly when you want to catch the attention of a user.

I browsed through the forums and with some advice from people was introduced to Jquery. Jquery is an advanced form of javascript. It is a opensource plugin consisting of some complex javascript functions which can be easily adapted to any webpage.

Even though i used Jquery, i still do not understand how it works nor its technical details. So, using Jquery doesn't require that you learn it completely.

In this article i will be telling you how to use a Jquery plugin in your visualforce page, and thereby bring in animation effects into your visualforce page.

You can view/download the Jquery plugin from here.. Click here

You can view a demo of the Jquery plugin inside a Visualforce Page here .. Click here

Step 1:

Download the Jquery plugin and Unzip it. You will find several folders. You will need to upload some files into Static Resources inorder to use the plugin into our Visualforce Pages.

Step 2:

Create the following static resources:

Name refers to the name to be given to your Static Resource. Path refers to the path in the folder that you get after unzipping the Jquery plugin downloaded from http://jqueryui.com/demos/effect/

Name : TickerEffects_JqueryJS Path: Jquery Effects\development-bundle\jquery-1.4.2.js

Name: TickerEffects_Core Path: Jquery Effects\development-bundle\ui\jquery.effects.core.js

Name: TickerEffects_Pulsate Path: Jquery Effects\development-bundle\ui\jquery.effects.pulsate.js

Name: explode Path: Jquery Effects\development-bundle\ui\jquery.effects.explode.js

Name: highlight Path: Jquery Effects\development-bundle\ui\jquery.effects.highlight.js

Name: shake Path: Jquery Effects\development-bundle\ui\jquery.effects.shake.js

Name: democss Path: Jquery Effects\development-bundle\demos\demos.css

Step 3:

Create the following Visualforce Page.

<apex:page showHeader="false">
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title>jQuery UI Effects - Effect demo</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.6/themes/base/jquery-ui.css" ></link>
    <script src="{!URLFOR($Resource.TickerEffects_JqueryJS)}"></script>
    <script src="{!URLFOR($Resource.TickerEffects_Core)}"></script>

    <script src="{!URLFOR($Resource.explode)}"></script>

    <script src="{!URLFOR($Resource.highlight)}"></script>
    <script src="{!URLFOR($Resource.TickerEffects_Pulsate)}"></script>

    <script src="{!URLFOR($Resource.shake)}"></script>

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{!URLFOR($Resource.democss)}"  />
    <style>
        .toggler { width: 500px; height: 200px; position: relative; }
        #button { padding: .5em 1em; text-decoration: none; }
        #effect { width: 240px; height: 135px; padding: 0.4em; position: relative; }
        #effect h3 { margin: 0; padding: 0.4em; text-align: center; }
        .ui-effects-transfer { border: 2px dotted gray; } 
    </style>
    <script>
    $(function() {
        // run the currently selected effect
        function runEffect() {
            // get effect type from 
            var selectedEffect = $( "#effectTypes" ).val();
            
            // most effect types need no options passed by default
            var options = {};
            // some effects have required parameters
            if ( selectedEffect === "scale" ) {
                options = { percent: 0 };
            } else if ( selectedEffect === "transfer" ) {
                options = { to: "#button", className: "ui-effects-transfer" };
            } else if ( selectedEffect === "size" ) {
                options = { to: { width: 200, height: 60 } };
            }

            // run the effect
            $( "#effect" ).effect( selectedEffect, options, 500, runEffect);
        };

        // callback function to bring a hidden box back
        function callback() {
            setTimeout(function() {
                $( "#effect" ).removeAttr( "style" ).hide().fadeIn();
            }, 1000 );
        };

        // set effect from select menu value
        $( "#button" ).click(function() {
            runEffect();
            return false;
        });
    });
    </script>
</head>
<body background="{!URLFOR($Resource.BGImage1)}" style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:8pt;">

<div class="demo">

<div class="toggler">
    <div id="effect" class="ui-widget-content ui-corner-all">
        
        <p>
            Etiam libero neque, luctus a, eleifend nec, semper at, lorem. Sed pede. Nulla lorem metus, adipiscing ut, luctus sed, hendrerit vitae, mi.
        </p>
    </div>
</div>

<select name="effects" id="effectTypes">

    <option value="explode">Explode</option>

    <option value="highlight">Highlight</option>

    <option value="pulsate">Pulsate</option>

    <option value="shake">Shake</option>


</select>

<a href="#" id="button" class="ui-state-default ui-corner-all">Run Effect</a>

</div><!-- End demo -->



<div class="demo-description">
<p>Select a effect from the drop down.</p>
</div><!-- End demo-description -->

</body>
</html>

</apex:page>

See for yourself the results!!

Chatter Rollout Guide

2010-11-11T02:27:00.000-08:00

Some organizations have already rolled out chatter, but just in case if you are planning to roll it out soon and if would want some customizations to be done on top of just enabling Chatter, then you may want to have a look at the below article.

The New User Interface Theme:

As you may be aware of, Chatter works only with the new User Interface theme of Salesforce. So, you will have to enable it first before you go on and turn on Chatter.

SetUp --> App SetUp --> Customize --> User Interface

Enabling Chatter:

The next step is to enable Chatter. This can be done by going to SetUp -->App SetUp --> Customize --> Chatter --> Settings

You may optionally turn on Chatter Emails. When you turn this on, salesforce automatically sends emails to users whenever some activity happens within Chatter. It is up to the user to turn on/off his specific email notifications.

Some Administrative tips:

As an administrator you have access to certain fields through the API which allows you to restrict/enable options for individual users of Chatter throughout your organization. Some of them are listed below.

Object : User

Field : DigestFrequency - This field allows you to specify the frequency in which users get digest emails from Salesforce Chatter. Possible values are

N stands for Never, D for Daily, W for Weekly. Doing a mass update to all user records using the Apex Data Loader would set the option specified for every user.

Object : User

Field : UserPreferencesDisableAutoSubForFeeds - As the name suggests, disables automatically following records you own. Possible values are

TRUE - disable auto follow
FALSE - enable auto follow

Object: CollaborationGroup

This object is used to store Chatter groups. You may use the Apex Data Loader to mass create groups by inserting records into this object.

Fields:

Name : The name for this group

OWNERID : The ID of the User who owns this group.

COLLABORATIONTYPE : Private or Public

Object: CollaborationGroupMember

This object is used to store the members for a group. You can mass add/remove members to Chatter groups using the Apex Data Loader.

NOTE: Salesforce automatically sends out an email notification to the person being added. To avoid this, turn OFF Chatter Emails , add members to the group and then TURN ON Chatter Emails.

Fields:

COLLABORATIONGROUPID: ID of the Chatter Group

MEMBERID : ID of the User.

NOTIFICATIONFREQUENCY : N (Never) / D (Daily) / W (Weekly)

Mass Update Profiles in Salesforce

2010-10-27T22:33:00.000-07:00

We have 150+ profiles in our org. All we wanted to do was to turn off a TAB in all profiles. I thought it to be a simple task at first, but it was not.

Even though you could use the ANT tool to retrieve and deploy Profiles, there are some components which you cannot access using the ANT tool. So, we finally ended up manually editing all Profiles. Anyhow, in this post i would be showing the steps to mass update Profiles. You may be successful depending on what you deploy or retrieve.

STEP 1: First of all, you will need to have the ANT tool Installed. If you haven't installed it yet, you can have a look here.

STEP 2: After having installed the ANT tool you will have to prepare the XML file to retrieve profile information. Here is a sample of the XML file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Package xmlns="http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata">
    <types>
        <members>*</members>
        <name>CustomTab</name>
    </types>
    <types>
        <members>*</members>
        <name>Profile</name>
    </types>
    <version>20.0</version>
</Package>

STEP 3: Use the above XML for retrieveUnpackaged. The result will be two folders one for Profile and one for Tabs. The Profile Folder will contain one file for each profile and each file will contain the custom tab settings for that profile.

To retrieve information other than TABS you may also use other types like "CustomApplication" to retrieve the security settings of Custom Applications for every profile. The more types you add, the more information is retrieved for every profile.

Read and Insert records from a CSV file - Using Visualforce

2010-08-25T22:07:00.000-07:00

The Apex Data Loader is always there when you want to insert records into Salesforce from a CSV file. But, just in case if you don't want your users to install the Apex Data Loader and learn how to use it, then here is a simple example which tells you how to do the same using Visualforce.

Click here to view the demo.

Step 1:

Download the template from the DEMO URL above. Save the file in your desktop. Upload the file into Static Resources with the name "AccountUploadTemplate".

Step 2:

Create an Apex Class named "FileUploader". Paste the code below and save it.

public class FileUploader 
{
    public string nameFile{get;set;}
    public Blob contentFile{get;set;}
    String[] filelines = new String[]{};
    List<Account> accstoupload;
    
    public Pagereference ReadFile()
    {
        nameFile=contentFile.toString();
        filelines = nameFile.split('\n');
        accstoupload = new List<Account>();
        for (Integer i=1;i<filelines.size();i++)
        {
            String[] inputvalues = new String[]{};
            inputvalues = filelines[i].split(',');
            
            Account a = new Account();
            a.Name = inputvalues[0];
            a.ShippingStreet = inputvalues[1];       
            a.ShippingCity = inputvalues[2];
            a.ShippingState = inputvalues[3];
            a.ShippingPostalCode = inputvalues[4];
            a.ShippingCountry = inputvalues[5];

            accstoupload.add(a);
        }
        try{
        insert accstoupload;
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            ApexPages.Message errormsg = new ApexPages.Message(ApexPages.severity.ERROR,'An error has occured. Please check the template or try again later');
            ApexPages.addMessage(errormsg);
        }    
        return null;
    }
    
    public List<Account> getuploadedAccounts()
    {
        if (accstoupload!= NULL)
            if (accstoupload.size() > 0)
                return accstoupload;
            else
                return null;                    
        else
            return null;
    }            
}

Step 3:

Create a Visualforce Page named "UploadAccounts". Paste the code below and save it.

<apex:page sidebar="false" controller="FileUploader">
   <apex:form >
      <apex:sectionHeader title="Upload data from CSV file"/>
      <apex:pagemessages />
      <apex:pageBlock >
             <center>
              <apex:inputFile value="{!contentFile}" filename="{!nameFile}" /> <apex:commandButton action="{!ReadFile}" value="Upload File" id="theButton" style="width:70px;"/>
              <br/> <br/> <font color="red"> <b>Note: Please use the standard template to upload Accounts. <a href="{!URLFOR($Resource.AccountUploadTemplate)}" target="_blank"> Click here </a> to download the template. </b> </font>
             </center>  
      
      
      <apex:pageblocktable value="{!uploadedAccounts}" var="acc" rendered="{!NOT(ISNULL(uploadedAccounts))}">
          <apex:column headerValue="Account Name">
              <apex:outputField value="{!acc.Name}"/>
          </apex:column>
          <apex:column headerValue="Shipping Street">
              <apex:outputField value="{!acc.ShippingStreet}"/>
          </apex:column>
          <apex:column headerValue="Shipping City">
              <apex:outputField value="{!acc.ShippingCity}"/>
          </apex:column>
          <apex:column headerValue="Shipping State">
              <apex:outputField value="{!acc.ShippingState}"/>
          </apex:column>
          <apex:column headerValue="Shipping Postal Code">
              <apex:outputField value="{!acc.ShippingPostalCode}"/>
          </apex:column>
          <apex:column headerValue="Shipping Country">
              <apex:outputField value="{!acc.ShippingCountry}"/>
          </apex:column>
      </apex:pageblocktable> 
      
      </apex:pageBlock>       
   </apex:form>   
</apex:page>

Screenshot:

Some pointers:

You can use only the standard template. Because, that's how we have done the mapping to the columns in excel and the fields in Salesforce. You can modify the mapping and use your own template.
Allowing the user to choose his own mapping is possible i believe, but may be a bit complex.
Also, we use a CSV file. So, you may have to use additional criteria if your data values itself have a comma in them (For ex: Billing Street = 'Mumbai, India ') . This would cause problems because Mumbai and India would be considered as seperate values because of the comma in between them.

Force.com Programming for all - A Starter's guide

2010-08-20T03:51:00.000-07:00

What is this about?

It has been a long time since i wrote an article which gave me enough satisfaction. As i was thinking, this topic came to my mind. People who are new to Salesforce find it difficult to understand the technical build-up of Salesforce, people already in Salesforce administration find it difficult to get into the programming side of Salesforce.

It was the same with me too. But, later on after browsing through many blogs, guides and some good training sessions i think i am in a comfortable position now. Hence, this article is a composition of all that.

Salesforce.com Architecture:

I have always seen myself getting fixed to a strict style of programming, even when there is an alternate easy way. So, please don't get fixed to such mindset (I've been too lazy to learn new methods). Before we get into programming further, its always good to understand the architecture.

The architecture presented below is what i heard from people and my own assumptions (not guaranteed to be 100% true).

So, your Sobject tables are not actually database tables. All Standard and Custom objects are actually VIEWS of the actual table. This is the reason you cannot have a "Select *" on your SOQL Queries.

Having said this, you may imagine how complex it would be to maintain such views, to maintain the field types, security etc etc. This is where Salesforce excels and other on-demand CRM's lack.

Salesforce.com Point and Click Customization:

If i remember correctly, until the mid of 2007 Visualforce did not exist and all Salesforce customization was done using point and click customizations like Workflows, object and field creation, page layouts, record types, approval processes etc. These do not require that you possess programming skills. The only part which required programming skills was Apex triggers, Apex Classes and S-controls. Even though these were powerful technologies, they were not used extensively until the advent of Visualforce.

Force.com Programming:

Developing applications using Visualforce, Apex Classes, Apex Triggers is collectively called Force.com programming. Because of the greater reach of Salesforce.com and its extensibility, it has become necessary that Salesforce.com Administrator's learn force.com programming. This helps to keep with the rapid pace of technological growth.

Why was Visualforce Introduced:

S-controls were mostly doing the job what Visualforce does now. S-controls were designed using HTML and Javascript. S-controls were used for building extensive customizations which were not available out-of-the-box.
But S-controls had their own disadvantages.

S-controls run on the client-side. Meaning that your code executes on your machine and not on Salesforce.com servers.
All your User Interface and the actions associated with them are not seperated. HTML (UI) and Javascript (actions) are in a single page. This lead to complex pages which were hardly understandable by people other than the original developer.

So, to eliminate these disadvantages Visualforce was introduced. Visualforce (UI) and Apex Controllers (Actions) gave developers more clarity and the ability to distinguish the UI from the backend actions. This also promotes re-usability of code.

Visualforce:

We will start with Visualforce, because as you start learning Visualforce you will learn Apex Classes as well.

Visualforce is a Mark-up Langauage. Much like HTML. A Mark-up Language is one that is composed of tags. For ex: (<html></html>)is a tag. Note that when you open a tag you will have to close it with the / sign. Some tags are self-closing meaning that they can be closed in the same tag in which they are open ( for ex: <br/>)

Visualforce defines the UI (User Interface) of your application. So, you may add tables, forms, text boxes, buttons, colors, styles etc using Visualforce tags. Let's start by creating a new visualforce page. Before that you will have to enable yourself for Visualforce development like shown below.

Go to your URL bar and type http://yoursalesforceinstance.com/apex/myfirstvfpage . (Note that yoursalesforce instance is specific for you like cs3.salesforce or na1.salesforce etc) You will be shown a message that the page does not exist. Click n the create link. The page would be created and some sample code would be generated. Just delete the code and paste the code shown below in the editor.

Save the Page

<apex:page sidebar="false">
<apex:form>
    <apex:sectionHeader title="My first Visualforce Page"/>
    <apex:pageblock>
        <apex:pageblocksection title="My first form" columns="1">
          <apex:pageblocksectionitem>
            <apex:outputlabel value="Enter your name"/>
            <apex:inputtext/>
          </apex:pageblocksectionitem>  
        </apex:pageblocksection>
    </apex:pageblock> 
</apex:form>           
</apex:page>

You have seen too much of these examples rite. OK, let's see a video. Believe me, you wont be seeing the ordinary stuff. Even if you have experience on working with Visualforce, this video might teach you something new.

Comments Welcome!!

Note: The video quality is very poor. I would be soon uploading one with good quality.

Part - TWO

Unique Field combination in Salesforce

2010-07-27T23:23:00.000-07:00

While creating fields in any object you have the option of specifying the field as UNIQUE. This means that the field can only have unique values and is meant for eradicating duplicates.

But, mostly we need to have a combination of fields to determine a unique record. For ex, say that "Account Name" and "Billing Country" together determine a unique record. In such a case, you cannot make the "Account Name" as well as the "Billing Country" fields unique, since the combination of these two fields is only unique and not they both separately.

In situations like this, we mostly write a trigger. But, there is a more easy and out-of-the-box functionality available.

STEP 1: Create a new field in the account object called "AccNameBillingAdd" with the field type "Text".

Make the field invisible to all profiles, of course the "System Administrator" would still have access to this field.

Do not add the field to any page layout.

STEP 2: Create a new Workflow rule on the "Account" object.

Create a "Field Update" for the workflow.

Do not forget to "Activate" the workflow.

STEP 3: See it in action, by creating two account's with the same Name and Billing Country. While you try to save the second one, you will be shown an error message as below.

The error message is meaningless, do let me know if you have any suggestions.

Debugging Visualforce Pages with custom Styles for UI compatibility

2010-06-30T22:25:00.000-07:00

I have been working on the force.com platform for nearly three years now, and the only problem which drives me nuts is when i have to deal with UI (User Interface) issues.

I have to admit that it really looks beautiful when you can have your own custom CSS for your visualforce pages with wonderful styles. But, when it comes to fixing UI issues i actually spend a lot of time to find the bug. Hence, in this article i have put together the methodologies i use to overcome them. This saves lot of your time (GUARANTEED).

The " !important " keyword:

!important - meaning - DONT take what is in the CSS. take what i tell here.

Let's jump straight. Let's say that you have a "div" with the name "styleme" and the defenition is as follows

.styleme
{
  margin:o;
}

This implies that there should be no space between the margin of your browser (actually the parent div) and the contents in this div.
And, let's say that you have a visualforce page like this

<apex:page>
<style>
.styleme
{
  margin:o;
}
</style>
     <div class="styleme">
             Hi!!! I am styled!!!
     </div>
</apex:page>

Just assume that this works fine in FireFox and when you view the same page in Internet Explorer there is a huge gap from the margin. Adding a simple keyword makes it to work across all browsers. Your visualforce page would now be like

<apex:page>
<style>
.styleme
{
  margin:o !important;
}
</style>
     <div class="styleme">
             Hi!!! I am styled!!!
     </div>
</apex:page>

This is just an example of how to use this keyword. Real scenarios may arise when you use your own CSS in conjunction with the Standard CSS of Salesforce. In such cases this keyword helps a lot.

Other uses of this keyword:

One other, major use of this keyword is when you want to override the Standard Styles of Salesforce.Say for example that want to override the color of the Page Block Header (this is transparent by default). The following code gives a red color to the header.

<apex:page>
<style>
.pbHeader
{
  background-color: RED !important;
}
</style>
     <apex:pageblock>
         <apex:sectionheader title="My custom Header"/>
     </apex:pageblock> 
</apex:page>

FIREBUG

Firebug is a great plugin for Firefox which comes in handy for debugging your pages. It helps you identify the associated style classes very easily.
You can download it from here .. Click here
It is using this plugin that i found that the styleclass for the pageblock header was 'pbHeader'.

How to use this???

When you open any normal salesforce page, click on the "bug" icon at the rightmost bottom of the page.

Then click on the select tool, like this

And then select the Element of which you want to know the styleclass.
Page Block Header in our case.

When you use this for Visualforce pages and have the "development mode" on your user page turned "on", make sure to remove the page editor by replacing your url with

htttp://cs1.salesforce.com/apex/samplevfpage?core.apexpages.devmode.url=1

This parameter removes the Page Editor and you get the clean CSS and HTML to analyze using FireBug.

Comments and Questions welcome!!!

One year down the lane

2010-06-23T03:14:00.000-07:00

A year back, this same day i started this blog. I was not serious at blogging, to be frank. But, i was really surprised by the support and encouragement that every visitor to this blog has given me. Your encouragement keeps me going and drives me to write more articles...

Thank you all !!!!!

Keep visiting!!!

HTTP Callout from Apex Class - A Simple Example

2010-06-19T10:59:00.000-07:00

Here is a simple example of a HTTP callout... I guess it does not need much explanation

Do write to me in case you need further clarification....

public class UploadFile_DifferentOrg {

    public UploadFile_DifferentOrg(ApexPages.StandardController controller)
    {

    }
    String ErrorMessage;

    public void Login()
    {
        
        ErrorMessage='';
        final string baseUrl = 'https://login.salesforce.com/'; 
        final string username = 'test@test.com'; 
        final string password = 'test@123';
        Http h = new Http();
        HttpRequest req = new HttpRequest();
        req.setMethod('GET');
        req.setEndpoint(baseUrl + '?loginType=&un='+username+'&pw='+password);
        HttpResponse res = h.send(req);
        
          
           req.setEndpoint(baseUrl + 'apex/UploadFile_DifferentOrg');
           
           res = h.send(req);
           if (res.getBody().indexOf('success=true')>-1)
           {
              system.debug('Success');
           }  
        }
    

    }

Visualforce Popup Window - pass parameters

2010-06-19T04:47:00.000-07:00

Here is a small example of how to pass values from your popup window to your parent window...........
This example uses javascript....

Parent Page: (popupparent)
Name this visualforce page as "popupparent"

<apex:page showheader="false" standardStylesheets="false">

   <form method="post" name="f1">
    <table> <tr>
            <td ><font face="Verdana">Your Name</font>
            
            <input type="text" name="p_name"> 
            
            
            <a href="javascript:void(0);" NAME="My Window Name" title=" My title here " onClick=window.open("/apex/popupchild?core.apexpages.devmode.url=1","Ratting","width=550,height=170,left=150,top=200,toolbar=1,status=1,"); >Click here to open the child window</a>
            
 
    </td></tr>
    
    </table>
    
  </form>  
 
</apex:page>

Child(Pop-up) Window:
Name this visualforce page as "popupchild"

<apex:page showheader="false" >
  <html>
<head>
 
<script langauge="javascript">
function post_value(){
opener.document.f1.p_name.value = document.frm.c_name.value;
self.close();
}
</script>
 
<title>(Type a title for your page here)</title>
</head>
 

<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#0000ff" vlink="#800080" alink="#ff0000">
 
<form name="frm">
<table >
 

<tr><td align="center"> Your name<input type="text" name="c_name" size="12" value="test"> <input type="button" value="Submit" onclick="post_value();">
</td></tr>
</table></form>
</apex:page>

What is Chatter all about?? The Pros and Cons

2010-06-03T04:47:00.000-07:00

I recently had to do an analysis about chatter as my customer wanted it to be enabled and i thought it would be worth sharing it here.

What is Chatter?

Before we start to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of chatter let me give you a sense of what chatter is.

Chatter is like a social networking website (twittter, orkut, facebook etc) with the only difference that the users of Chatter are the people within a company (ie Salesforce.com users). Chatter is an application which allows you to connect and share information with your colleagues in real time. Chatter when used efficiently could lead to excellent Service and Sales within your company.

As an example, let's say that you are using the "Call Center" application of Salesforce. A customer of yours has raised a case and it is being taken care of by your customer service representative. If the representative does not know a solution, he can simply write a post in chatter asking for help. His colleagues could help him quickly by replying to the post. This would lead to quicker customer service.

More Information about Chatter:

You can find more information, code recipes, and an excellent custom application called "Chatter Bubbles". click here.

What you can't find in the above link is obviously the disadvantages. So, let's see it here.

Features not available as of now :

Chatter could be enabled for the entire organization only. So, if you say that you want only a had full of users to use Chatter then that's not possible.
The profile page (Profile tab) of every user is not customizable. When you login to Salesforce, at the right topmost corner you will see your Name next to the Setup link. When you click on this link you will be shown your profile page, which displays the people you follow, the people who follow you etc. This page is not customizable.
Chatter email notifications are predefined. You cannot customize them.
Anybody can follow anybody. NO RESTRICTIONS.
You can see the Show/Hide Chatter button on the home page as well as on the detail page of any record (the associated object should be enabled for chatter). You cannot remove it from the home page as well as from the detail page of records. The Chatter gadget is not associated with page layout and hence cannot be removed.

I hope that these will be addressed soon by salesforce.

Some Quick Tips:

Get registered for a free developer preview - Click here

Chatter Email Settings:

Chatter custom feeds:

You can write triggers to create custom feeds. All objects related to chatter are exposed through the API and hence you can play around with them. Here is a small example

trigger customfeeds on Opportunity (after update) 
{
     for ( Opportunity newopp: Trigger.new) 
     {
             Opportunity oldopp = Trigger.oldMap.get(newopp.id);
             if (newopp.Probability != oldopp.Probability)
             {
                 FeedPost fpost = new FeedPost();
                 fpost.ParentId = newopp.Id; 
                 fpost.Body = ' - Probability has changed from '+oldopp.Probability +'%'+ ' to '+newopp.Probability +'%';
                 insert fpost;
             }
     }           

    
}

Expand / Collapse Pageblock table columns in Visualforce

2010-04-23T06:09:00.000-07:00

As a continuation to my previous post of "Displaying nested PageBlock tables", in this article i would be explaining the steps to expand/collapse your nested table. To read the previous article Click here

Why do this???

Mainly, to improve readability and user friendliness. Secondly, by doing so you better understand the power of Javascript combined with Visualforce.

Step 1:

You will need two images, one for expand and the other for collapse. Below are the two images. Right-click the images and save it to your machine.

- Upload this image into Static Resource as Plus_Image

- Upload this image into Static Resource as Minus_Image

Step 2:

Upload these files into Static Resource.

Step 3:

Create an Apex Class named "nestedqueryexample". Paste the following code.

public class nestedqueryexample
{
  public List<Account> getaccsandtmember()
  {
      List<Account> accounts = [Select Id,(Select TeamMemberRole, User.Name From Account.AccountTeamMembers), Name, BillingCountry from Account];
      return accounts;
  }
}

Step 4:

Create a Visualforce Page named "nestedqueryexample". Paste the following code.

<apex:page tabstyle="Account" controller="nestedqueryexample" showheader="false">
<script>
        function switchMenu(obj,obj1,obj2) 
        {
            var el = document.getElementById(obj);                                       
            if ( el.style.display != 'none' ) {
            el.style.display = 'none';
            }
            else {
            el.style.display = '';
            }
            var e2 = document.getElementById(obj1);                                       
            if ( e2.style.display != 'none' ) {
            e2.style.display = 'none';
            }
            else {
            e2.style.display = '';
            }
             var e3 = document.getElementById(obj2);                                       
            if ( e2.style.display != 'none' ) {
            e3.style.display = 'none';
            }
            else {
            e3.style.display = '';
            }

        }
</script>
    <apex:pageblock >     
        <apex:pageblocktable value="{!accsandtmember}"  var="accdet">
            <apex:column >
                   <apex:facet name="header">                                        
                         Team Members                                                                               
                    </apex:facet>
                    <apex:outputpanel id="plusimage">
                          <apex:image url="{!$Resource.Plus_Image}" onclick="switchMenu('{!$Component.inlinetablesec}','{!$Component.minusimage}','{!$Component.plusimage}')" title="Expand - Team Member's"/> 
                    </apex:outputpanel>
                    <apex:outputpanel id="minusimage" style="display:none;">
                          <apex:image url="{!$Resource.Minus_image}" onclick="switchMenu('{!$Component.inlinetablesec}','{!$Component.plusimage}','{!$Component.minusimage}')" title="Collapse - Team Member's"/>
                    </apex:outputpanel>
                    <apex:outputpanel id="inlinetablesec" style="display:none;">
                                                <apex:variable value="{!0}" var="rowNum"/>
                                                <apex:repeat var="count" value="{!accdet.AccountTeamMembers}">
                                                    <apex:variable var="rowNum" value="{!rowNum+1}"/>
                                                </apex:repeat>
                            <apex:outputText rendered="{!rowNum=0}">  No Team Members  </apex:outputText>
                        <apex:pageblocktable value="{!accdet.AccountTeamMembers}" var="tm" rendered="{!rowNum>0}">
                            <apex:column headerValue="Team Member">
                                   <apex:outputfield value="{!tm.User.Name}"/>
                             </apex:column>
                             <apex:column headerValue="Role">
                                   <apex:outputfield value="{!tm.TeamMemberRole}"/>
                             </apex:column>                          
                        </apex:pageblocktable>
                   </apex:outputpanel>     
            </apex:column>
            <apex:column headervalue="Account Name">
                    <apex:outputtext value="{!accdet.Name}"/>
            </apex:column>
            <apex:column headervalue="Billing Country">
                    <apex:outputtext value="{!accdet.BillingCountry}"/>
            </apex:column>
        </apex:pageblocktable>
    </apex:pageblock>
</apex:page>

Code Explained:

In this example, we have used a Javascript function named "switchMenu". In our visualforce Page, we have placed the nested pageblocktable, the expand image and the collapse image into three apex:outputpanel's.

When the expand or collapse image is clicked when call the Javascript function which displays the necessary outputpanel's and hides the ones that are not required.

If you note carefully, we have passed parameters to the javascript function using $Component variable. Components inside a table or repeat tag are preappended with an integer value to identify them uniquely.

For example, our nested pageblocktable has an id "inlinetablesec". So, for the first row the id of this table would be 0:inlinetablesec and for the next 1:inlinetablesec and so on. This is done automatically by Salesforce, and we make use of this in our javascript function to display/hide the respective tables.

Hope this article helps you in some way. Write to me in case you have any difficulties.

Screenshot:

Nested Tables and Nested Queries in Visualforce - An Example

2010-04-16T09:27:00.000-07:00

I recently had to work on a requirement which included nested queries and nested tables. Thanks to the forums and the developer guides, i got the information from a couple of posts and articles.

This article is just a consolidation of information spread over many places.

Scenario:

I will have to display a list of Accounts. Under each account i will have to display the associated Account Team Members.

SOQL Query:

The SOQL Query to retrieve both the Account Details as well as the Account Team Member details will be as follows..

Select Id,(Select TeamMemberRole, User.Name From Account.AccountTeamMembers), Name, BillingCountry from Account

This is what is called a nested query which is quite obvious from the fact that you can see two "Select" statements in a single query..

Now, let us create a simple visualforce page to display the query results.

Visualforce Page:

<apex:page tabstyle="Account" controller="nestedqueryexample">
    <apex:pageblock> 
        <apex:pageblocktable value="{!accsandtmember}"  var="accdet">
            <apex:column >
                   <apex:facet name="header">                                        
                         Team Members                                                                               
                    </apex:facet>
                    <apex:pageblocktable value="{!accdet.AccountTeamMembers}" var="tm">
                        <apex:column headerValue="Team Member">
                               <apex:outputfield value="{!tm.User.Name}"/>
                         </apex:column>
                         <apex:column headerValue="Role">
                               <apex:outputfield value="{!tm.TeamMemberRole}"/>
                         </apex:column>                          
                    </apex:pageblocktable>
            </apex:column>
            <apex:column headervalue="Account Name">
                    <apex:outputtext value="{!accdet.Name}"/>
            </apex:column>
            <apex:column headervalue="Billing Country">
                    <apex:outputtext value="{!accdet.BillingCountry}"/>
            </apex:column>
        </apex:pageblocktable>
    </apex:pageblock>
</apex:page>

Controller (Apex Class):


public class nestedqueryexample
{
  public List<Account> getaccsandtmember()
  {
      List<Account> accounts = [Select Id,(Select TeamMemberRole, User.Name From Account.AccountTeamMembers), Name, BillingCountry from Account];
      return accounts;
  }
}

Your final output will look like this.

Looks messy rite?. We will add a expand/collapse button for the nested table to make it look clean.

Learn More - Click here

The New User Interface for Salesforce.com - Cool !!!!!!

2010-02-28T22:43:00.000-08:00

I just recently enabled the new User Interface of Salesforce.com and found it to be really interesting...

Here is how you can enable it in your sandbox

Login to your sandbox. Navigate to Setup -> App Setup -> User Interface . You can then enable the option as shown in the picture below.

The new theme is supported only in the latest version of browsers like Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer . You will get a popup window displaying this message.

Now click on any tab to see the new User Interface.

Setup ,however has the old theme. Below are some screen shots to make you go crazy!!

Here is a look of a Visualforce Page

And Report looks like this

I think most of you would like this... Doesn't it look cool??

Salesforce.com Spring '10 - Some features you really need to check out

2010-01-27T06:51:00.000-08:00

Spring'10 release is just around the corner and here are some features that i found really cool !!

Authenticated Force.com Sites:

The only way of authenticating a Force.com site was by using Portal licenses or by writing your own custom logic to validate logins (I personally felt this was a major drawback). But now, with Spring'10 you have a special user type called "Authenticated Web Site User" with which you can authenticate your force.com site users. So, no more purchasing licenses and i believe this feature is free.

Code Scheduler:

Your Apex Code can now be scheduled to run automatically at regular intrevals. This feature is similar to Cronkit(Appexchange), only difference is that it now comes in-buil in Salesforce.com with no package installations.

Cool User Icon:

I found this new Image for User pretty cool!! :-)

Read the entire official release preview guide here - Click here

Adding a Visualforce Page to the Home Page Layout

2009-12-15T01:51:00.000-08:00

Update: Specify the height and width for the iframe in pixels, as % does not work.

Step 1:

Create a Visualforce Page. We create a simple static table with some styles to give an appealing look..

Name the Page as "homelogo"

<apex:page showheader="false" >
<style>
table.fancy {
margin: 1em 1em 1em 0;
background: whitesmoke;
border-collapse: collapse;
}
table.fancy tr:hover {
background: lightsteelblue !important;
}
table.fancy th, table.fancy td {
border: 1px silver solid;
padding: 0.2em;
}
table.fancy th {
background: gainsboro;
text-align: left;
}
table.fancy caption {
margin-left: inherit;
margin-right: inherit;
}
</style>
<table class="fancy">
<tr>
<th>Key</th><th>Value</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ACT</td><td>Australian Capital Territory</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>NSW</td><td>New South Wales</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>NT</td><td>Northern Territory</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>QLD</td><td>Queensland</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SA</td><td>South Australia</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TAS</td><td>Tasmania</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>VIC</td><td>Victoria</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>WA</td><td>Western Australia</td>
</tr>
</table>

</apex:page>

Step 2:

Create a new HomePage component.

Step 3:

Give a name for your component and select"HTML Area" option.

Step 4:

Check the "Show HTML" option in the rightmost corner.

Step 5:

Type the following code in the editor window

<br><iframe src="/apex/homelogo?core.apexpages.devmode.url=1" width="500px" height="600px"></iframe></br>

Step 6:

Add the component you just now created to your Home Page Layout. And Done!!!

Here's a snapshot of the HomePage..

Inline Editing in Visualforce

2009-11-23T04:02:00.000-08:00

Update: Inline Editing is now available and supported out of the box. Click here to know more

You might be aware that inline editing is not supported in Visualforce as of now.

I tried to create a Visualforce Page and wrote a custom logic to Mimic the Inline Editing Functionality. Not a 100% mimic though, but to some extent a decent one...

Step 1:

Create an Apex Class named "inlineediting" and paste the code below....

public class inlineediting {

public Boolean readonly;
public boolean editmode;
public inlineediting(ApexPages.StandardController controller)
{
readonly=true;
editmode=false;
}
public boolean getreadonlymode(){return readonly;}

public void setreadonlymode(Boolean readonly)
{
this.readonly= readonly;
}
public boolean geteditmode(){return editmode;}

public void seteditmode(Boolean editmode)
{
this.editmode= editmode;
}
public void inlineedit()
{
system.debug('entered here');
readonly = false;
editmode = true;
}   

}

Step 2:

Create a Visualforce Page with the following code...

<apex:page standardcontroller="Account" extensions="inlineediting" showheader="false">
<apex:form >
<apex:pageBlock >
<apex:outputPanel id="outpanel">
<apex:pageblocksection columns="1">
<apex:pageblocksectionItem >
<apex:outputlabel value="Account Name" for="Accname" rendered="{!readonlymode}">
<apex:actionSupport event="ondblclick" action="{!inlineedit}" rerender="outpanel"/>
</apex:outputlabel>
<apex:outputtext value="{!Account.Name}" rendered="{!readonlymode}" id="Accname">

</apex:outputtext>
</apex:pageblocksectionItem>          


<apex:inputfield value="{!Account.Name}" rendered="{!editmode}"/>

</apex:pageblocksection>    
</apex:outputPanel>
</apex:pageBlock>
</apex:form>         
</apex:page>

Name the Visualforce Page as "Inlineediting" (for example)
Step 3:

Go to the URL bar and type the following

https://na5.salesforce.com/apex/inlineediting?id=0017000000ZUYGv

Note:- The bold part denotes your salesforce.com instance and a valid AccountId in your Instance.

Also, you will have to double click on the "Account Name" label to see the functionality.

You could then customize the code as per your needs...

Screenshots:

One to One relationship in Salesforce

2009-11-13T23:28:00.000-08:00

Well, Salesforce offers one to many relationship and recently Many to Many relationship has also been possible using the concept of a Junction object...

But, is there a One to One relationship in Salesforce. Well, it is not available out of the Box. But is definitely achievable using simple workflow rules...

Scenario:

Let's consider the scenario that we would like to establish a One to One relationship between Accounts and Contacts..

Step 1:

Create a custom field on the Contact object. Make the field unique. This field would be used to hold the ID of the associated Account.

Step 2:

Create a Workflow rule on Contact. Update the custom field with the value of the associated Account ID.

Done!! you have established a one to one relationship between Account and Contacts...

When you try to add a second contact to the Account, the "unique" constraint would be violated and an error would be thrown.....

Events and Calendar in Salesforce - Advantages and Limitattions

2009-10-30T06:17:00.000-07:00

I was playing around with the Events and Calendar functionality available in Salesforce and thought it would be worth sharing my understanding......... Here it is.......

Events:

Advantages

You can add multiple Participants to an Event.
The Participant could be a User, a Contact or a Lead.
You can send Invites to all participants.
You can associate any object with an Event.
Meeting Invites display the start and end time according to the User's Time Zone.
Out of the box 'outlook' / 'Lotus Notes' sync

Limitations:

You cannot modify the meeting invite.
You cannot add a custom LOOK UP field to your Event (Setup --> Activity Custom Fields).
Meeting Invites display in the Time Zone of the Event creator for Participants who are Contacts (Obviously, they do not have a Time Zone).

Only 1 x large text field
Date cannot be used in formulas / workflows
It is not simple to view all the events a participant has been to (attendees vs 'who' on the event)
Invites have salesforce branding (can be removed with a black tab setting)
Polymorphic fields (who and what) are difficult to use in formulas

Calendar:

Advantages:

You have multiple views of your calendar (Weekly,daily,multi-user view etc).
You can view event details straight from your calendar by just hovering over the date (Mini Page Layout's actually).

Limitations:

You are allowed to create elapsing events. Salesforce does not stop you from creating an Event for a User even if he is BUSY.
Calendar displays multiple Events side by side.
The Calendar can only be placed in the Home Page.
The Calendar is not customizable.

Salesforce.com - Reference to tools and resources - All in one place

2009-10-16T05:37:00.000-07:00

Everytime i need to install a administrative tool or if i need tutorials or references, i found that i spend a considerable amount of time in locating them... As a result, this article came to my mind..

Here, you will find links to some of the administrative tools in Salesforce.com as well as less-known good resources..

This list would be updated as and when i find new resources.. So, make sure you bookmark this page :-)

Salesforce objects, fields and their usage - Complete description

This is the official WebServices Developer's guide but has enough information that you would want to know about Salesforce objects, how to use them etc through the API. Click here

Excel Connector for Salesforce.com

Sforce Connector - Click here

Office toolkit 3.0 - Click here

Please note that Office toolkit 4.0 is installed automatically when you install the Outlook connector for Salesforce....

Apex Explorer

Installation guide and notes - Click here

Installation file - Click here to download

Apex Data Loader

Installation guide and notes - Click here

Running the Apex Data Loader from the command prompt: Click here
Running the Apex Data Loader from the command prompt (Simplified) : Click here

SFDC Web to anything -

You might have heard about web to Case, web to anything lets you to create records in any object through a web form..

You can find the code, screenshots and description here - Click here

Tutorials and guides -

The official salesforce.com guide's and tutorial's page - Click here

Discussion forums -

The official salesforce.com community forums - Click here

Rerender and actionsupport - A simple example

2009-10-13T08:45:00.000-07:00

What is the purpose of Rerender??

Rerender is used when you want to refresh only a portion of your visualforce page when the user does some action... This would actually improve the user interface and reduce processing time....

In this article we will go through a simple example which demonstrates the usage of these two attributes..

A small program:

Create a visualforce page with the following code...

<apex:page >
<apex:form>
   <apex:pageBlock>
       <apex:sectionHeader title="Rerender Example"/>      
           <apex:commandButton value="Move your mouse here to refresh the time!">
               <apex:actionSupport event="onmouseover" rerender="time" status="refreshstatus"/>
           </apex:commandButton>
           <apex:actionStatus id="refreshstatus" startstyle="color:green;" startText="Refreshing...."></apex:actionStatus>  
           <apex:outputpanel id="time">
               <apex:outputtext value="{!NOW()}"/>
           </apex:outputpanel>  
   </apex:pageBlock>
</apex:form>  
</apex:page>

Save the page and move your mouse across the button to see the results....

Understanding the code:

We will now analyze the code..

<apex:actionSupport event="onmouseover" rerender="time" status="refreshstatus"/>

The event attribute determines which action should refresh the page, we have a onmouseover. That's why when you move the mouse over the command button, the time gets refreshed..

The rerender attribute determines the portion of the page to be refreshed. We have "time" which is the ID of the portion to be refreshed....

The actionstatus attribute determines the status message to be displayed when the refresh takes place. We have "refreshstatus" which is the ID of the associated "actionstatus" tag...

Developer challenge results announced

2009-10-01T09:28:00.000-07:00

The most awaited developer challenge results have been announced...

I was really amazed by the extraordinary stuff that has been created by people across the globe..

You can view the winner,runner up and some special sites here...

Duplicates in Salesforce - A better approach

2009-09-10T06:05:00.000-07:00

Duplicate data is always a problem, particularly when the quantity of data is too large and when the quality of data is very critical..

Salesforce uses a 'UNIQUE' definition on a field to avoid duplicates. When this attribute is set to TRUE you will have only unique values in the field.

Problem:
Salesforce displays an error message when you try to enter a duplicate value and click on "SAVE". But, you would not want the user to enter all values and get an error message as the last step. Moreover, in some cases you would not want the user to create a new record if it already exists...

Solution:
Clearly, a search for existing records before creating a new one would be a typical solution. But not all fields are searchable.....

A more user friendly approach would be to allow the user to enter the UNIQUE field first, if the value already exists he would be shown an error message else he will be redirected to the normal New Page screen...

Step 1:

Create a Visualforce Page with the code below....

<apex:page standardController="Case" extensions="caseApex">
 <apex:pageBlock title="Tickets">
     <apex:form >
             Enter your Ticket Number Here
                             &nbsp;&nbsp;<apex:inputField value="{!NewCase.Ticket_Number__c}"/>
             <apex:commandButton action="{!Next}" value="click here to proceed" status="status"/>
                 
         <!-- Display error message -->
             <apex:pagemessage strength="2" title="Error!!" severity="error" detail="This Ticket Already Exists !!!" rendered="{!errormsg}"/><!-- End of error message -->
               <apex:pageblocktable rendered="{!NOT(ISNULL(existingcase))}" value="{!existingcase}" var="case">
                               <apex:column headervalue="Select">
                                       <apex:commandlink action="{!SelectTicket}">
                                           <input type="radio" name="CaseSel"/>
                                       </apex:commandlink>                                         
                              </apex:column>
                              <apex:column headervalue="Ticket Number"> <apex:outputtext value="{!case.Ticket_Number__c}"/>  </apex:column>
                              <apex:column headervalue="Description"> <apex:outputtext value="{!case.Description}"/>  </apex:column>
               </apex:pageblocktable>
     </apex:form>
 </apex:pageBlock>
</apex:page>

The Apex Code for the Visualforce Page is as below...

public class caseApex {

public boolean errormsg=false;
public String CaseId=System.currentPageReference().getParameters().get('id');
public String tnum;
public List<Case> chkdup;
public Case newcase= new Case();

 public caseApex(ApexPages.StandardController controller)
 {
 }
 public case getnewcase()
 {
     return newcase;
 }
 public case getexistingcase()
 {
     if (chkdup!= NULL)
     {
     if(chkdup.size()>0)
         return chkdup[0];
     else
         return null;
     }
     else
         return null;
 }

public pagereference Next()
{
 chkdup=[select Ticket_Number__c,id,Description from Case where Ticket_Number__c=:newcase.Ticket_Number__c limit 1];
 if(chkdup.size()==0)
 {
      String tnum=newcase.Ticket_Number__c;
      Pagereference newcase1 = new Pagereference('/500/e?nooverride=true&00N90000000LSLd='+tnum+'');
      return newcase1;
 }
 else
 {
       errormsg=true;
       return null;
 }

}

public pagereference SelectTicket()
{
   Pagereference chkdup = new Pagereference('/'+chkdup[0].Id);
   return chkdup;
}

public boolean geterrormsg()
{
  return errormsg;
}
}

Please note the coloured part in the above code... This is a hardcoded value for my instance. It denotes the field Id.. A better explanation about this is available here

Step 2:

Override the "New" button of "Cases" with the Visualforce Page you created....

Screenshots:

When the user clicks on "New" button under Case he will be shown this Page

Below is a screnshot showing a message that the case already exits

Using Salesforce CSS styles in your page

2009-09-03T04:33:00.000-07:00

Having something look standard and uniform really matters.. You would like to present the user with the Standard look and feel wherever possible..

Situations in which this may not be possible are

Email Templates
Web-to-Lead
Etc etc

As you may be knowing, Salesforce uses a bunch of CSS files to present users with the standard salesforce look and feel..

Click here to read the Salesforce documentation. The following three files are the most commonly used.

Note that i have specified "na5.salesforce.com" in the URL, this is to be used when your page would be displayed outside of Salesforce otherwise you may omit this part. This may be any instance, not specifically na5... This file is public so anyone can access it. you do not need a Salesforce username and password to access it..

      <link class="user" href="https://na5.salesforce.com/sCSS/16.0/sprites/1245343872000/Theme2/default/elements.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
    <link class="user" href="https://na5.salesforce.com/sCSS/16.0/sprites/1245343872000/Theme2/default/common.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
    <link  href="https://na5.salesforce.com/sCSS/16.0/sprites/1251310209000/Theme2/dStandard.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Scenario:

I have a table to display in my Visualforce email template. I am using a HTML table. Since the apex:detail tag is not available with Visualforce email templates, i will display the information in a HTML table and apply salesforce look and feel o make it appear as a standard Detail Page...

Plain HTML Table:

          <table  style="font-size:100%" border="0" cellpadding="5" border="0" cellspacing="0">       
           <tr>
                <td>Opportunity Name:</td><td >{!Relatedto.Name}</td>
                <td>Stage:</td><td ><apex:outputfield value="{!Relatedto.StageName}"/></td>
           </tr>

           <tr>
                <td><apex:outputlabel value="Account:"/></td><td ><apex:outputfield value="{!Relatedto.Account.Name}"/></td>
                <td><apex:outputlabel value="Close Date:"/></td><td ><apex:outputfield value="{!Relatedto.CloseDate}"/></td>
           </tr>       
           <tr>
               <td><apex:outputlabel value="Amount:"/></td><td><apex:outputField value="{!Relatedto.Amount}"/></td>
               <td><apex:outputlabel value="Primary Campaign:"/></td><td ><apex:outputfield value="{!Relatedto.Campaign.Name}"/></td>    
           </tr>
      </table>

Preview:

HTML Table with Salesforce look and feel:

 <head>
      <link class="user" href="https://na5.salesforce.com/sCSS/16.0/sprites/1245343872000/Theme2/default/elements.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
      <link class="user" href="https://na5.salesforce.com/sCSS/16.0/sprites/1245343872000/Theme2/default/common.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
      <link  href="https://na5.salesforce.com/sCSS/16.0/sprites/1251310209000/Theme2/dStandard.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
 </head>
 <body class="opportunityTab  detailPage">
 <div class="bPageBlock secondaryPalette">
     <div class="pbBody">
        <div class="pbSubsection">
            <table  >      
           <tr>
                <td class="labelCol">Opportunity Name:</td><td >{!Relatedto.Name}</td>
                <td class="labelCol">Stage:</td><td ><apex:outputfield value="{!Relatedto.StageName}"/></td>
           </tr>
           <tr>
                <td class="labelCol"><apex:outputlabel value="Account:"/></td><td ><apex:outputfield value="{!Relatedto.Account.Name}"/></td>
                <td class="labelCol"><apex:outputlabel value="Close Date:"/></td><td ><apex:outputfield value="{!Relatedto.CloseDate}"/></td>
           </tr>      
           <tr>
               <td class="labelCol"><apex:outputlabel value="Amount:"/></td><td><apex:outputField value="{!Relatedto.Amount}"/></td>
               <td class="labelCol"><apex:outputlabel value="Primary Campaign:"/></td><td ><apex:outputfield value="{!Relatedto.Campaign.Name}"/></td>   
           </tr>
          </table>
        </div>
   </div>
</div>
</body>

Preview:

Code Explanation:

The blue colored part in the code above is the modifications that we have done to our plain HTML table. Now ,let's analyze the code in detail... The Head tag as you know contain links to salesforce style sheets...

<body class="opportunityTab  detailPage">

This sets the color of the Page layout to Opportunity since we have specified Opportunitytab in the styleclass.. If you set it o Accounttab the style of Account will be applied....

<div class="bPageBlock secondaryPalette">

This div denotes the pageblock this is the main outer div....

<div class="pbBody">

This div denotes the pageblocksection.

<div class="pbSubsection">

This div denotes the data to be displayed inside the pabeblocksection.

Inside the HTML table we have td class="labelCol", this is used only for headings to make sure that it is bold and is right aligned..

Complete code of Visualforce Email Template:

 <messaging:emailTemplate subject="Testing Email Template with Salesforce look" recipientType="Contact" relatedToType="Opportunity">
<messaging:htmlEmailBody >
<head>
    <link class="user" href="https://na5.salesforce.com/sCSS/16.0/sprites/1245343872000/Theme2/default/elements.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
    <link class="user" href="https://na5.salesforce.com/sCSS/16.0/sprites/1245343872000/Theme2/default/common.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
    <link  href="https://na5.salesforce.com/sCSS/16.0/sprites/1251310209000/Theme2/dStandard.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
<body class="opportunityTab  detailPage">
<div class="bPageBlock secondaryPalette">
   <div class="pbBody">
      <div class="pbSubsection">
            <table  style="font-size:100%" border="0" cellpadding="5" border="0" cellspacing="0">       
           <tr>
                <td class="labelCol">Opportunity Name:</td><td >{!Relatedto.Name}</td>
                <td class="labelCol">Stage:</td><td ><apex:outputfield value="{!Relatedto.StageName}"/></td>
           </tr>
           <tr>
                <td class="labelCol"><apex:outputlabel value="Account:"/></td><td ><apex:outputfield value="{!Relatedto.Account.Name}"/></td>
                <td class="labelCol"><apex:outputlabel value="Close Date:"/></td><td ><apex:outputfield value="{!Relatedto.CloseDate}"/></td>
           </tr>       
           <tr>
               <td class="labelCol"><apex:outputlabel value="Amount:"/></td><td><apex:outputField value="{!Relatedto.Amount}"/></td>
               <td class="labelCol"><apex:outputlabel value="Primary Campaign:"/></td><td ><apex:outputfield value="{!Relatedto.Campaign.Name}"/></td>    
           </tr>
          </table>
        </div>
   </div>
</div>
</body>
</messaging:htmlEmailBody>
</messaging:emailTemplate>

Building a Blog Application(Website) using Visualforce and Force.com Sites

2009-08-27T05:34:00.000-07:00

REFERENCES:
The following references have been used in building this site..

In this article i would be explaining how i built my Force.com Site. The steps explained will help you build a similar such site, you can then customize the site as per your needs...

Create a object with the following information.
Object Name: Article

Field Label	Field Name	type
Article Title	Name	Text
Article Description	Article_Description	Text
Author	Author	Text
createdmonth	createdmonth	Formula -MONTH( DATEVALUE(CreatedDate))
Category	Category	Picklist (VisualForce,Apex Class,Apex Triggers,Set-up and Config,Other)

STEP1:
I browsed through the net for free web templates and found hundreds of them... I downloaded one such template from this link.. Click here.

After you download the Zip file and extract it you will find a folder called "images" and a CSS file named "styles"... Create a Zip file of these two and name it deerpark(for example)..

Now upload this deerpark.zip file as a Static Resource into SFDC... I named the Static resource as "SFUNEARTHEDCSS" , and make the Cache Control as Public...

STEP2:

Open the "index" HTML file provide along with the CSS and images folder... Open the file using a notepad or wordpad to view the HTML code...

You will have to modify this code ,insert visualorce tags whereever necessary and save them as visualforce pages.. This is how i did it..

STEP3:

Create a Visualforce Component to use as the Site Header. We are using components here to avoid repetition of code... In all pages the header would be the same, hence creating a component would enable reuse of code...

Setup --> Develop --> Components --> New

Create a new component with the name "SFUnearthedHeader" and paste the code below..

<apex:component >
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Salesforce Unearthed</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="" />
<meta name="description" content="" />
<link href="{!URLFOR($Resource.SFUNEARTHEDCSS,'style.css')}" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" />
</head>
<body>


<div id="header-wrapper">
<div id="logo">
<h1><a href="http://salesforceexperts.blogspot.com">Salesforce Unearthed</a></h1>
</div>
<hr />
<!-- end #logo -->
<div id="header">
<div id="menu">
    <ul>
        <li><a href="#">Home</a></li>
        <li><a href="/apex/SFUnearthed_Articles">Articles</a></li>
        <li><a href="http://salesforceexperts.blogspot.com">Blog</a></li>
        <li><a href="/apex/SFUnearthed_Resources">Resources</a></li>
        <!--<li><a href="#">Time to Relax</a></li>-->
    </ul>
</div>
<!-- end #menu -->
</div>
<!-- end #header -->
</div>
<!-- end #header-wrapper -->
</apex:component>

I have modified the links and the link names... modify them as per your needs...

STEP 4: Creating Visualforce Pages..

I have a image stored as a Static resource named "createnewarticle"..

Save the above image to your desktop and upload as a static resource with name "createnewarticle" ....

Create a Visualforce page named "SFUnearthed_articles"

VF code is..

<apex:page showheader="false" controller="SFUnearthed" title="Salesforce Unearthed" action="{!pageload}">
<c:SFUnearthedHeader ></c:SFUnearthedHeader>
<apex:form >

<div id="page">
<div id="content">

<apex:outputpanel id="articlespace">
 <apex:repeat value="{!articles}" var="article">
 <div class="post">
     <h2 class="title">{!article.Name}</h2>
     <p class="date">{!article.Category__c}</p>
     <p class="meta"><em>Posted by <a href="#">{!article.Author__c}</a> {!article.CreatedDate}</em></p>
     <div class="entry">
         <apex:outputtext escape="false" value="{!article.Article_Description__c}"/>
     </div>
 </div>
 </apex:repeat>
</apex:outputpanel>
</div>
<!-- end #content -->
<div id="sidebar">
     <ul>
         <div style="position:relative;left:40px;">
         <apex:commandlink action="{!createnewarticle}"> <apex:image url="{!$Resource.createnewarticle}"/> </apex:commandlink>
         </div>
         <br/>
         <li>
         <h2>Categories</h2>
         <ul>
             <li><apex:commandlink value="Visualforce" action="{!Category}"><apex:actionsupport event="onclick" rerender="articlespace"/><apex:param name="category" value="visualforce"/></apex:commandlink></li>
             <li><apex:commandlink value="Apex Class" action="{!Category}"><apex:actionsupport event="onclick" rerender="articlespace"/><apex:param name="category" value="Apex Class"/></apex:commandlink> </li>
             <li><apex:commandlink value="Apex Triggers" action="{!Category}"><apex:actionsupport event="onclick" rerender="articlespace"/><apex:param name="category" value="Apex Triggers"/></apex:commandlink> </li>
             <li><apex:commandlink value="Set-up and Config" action="{!Category}"><apex:actionsupport event="onclick" rerender="articlespace"/><apex:param name="category" value="Set-up and Config"/></apex:commandlink> </li>
             <li><apex:commandlink value="Others" action="{!Category}"><apex:actionsupport event="onclick" rerender="articlespace"/><apex:param name="category" value="Other"/></apex:commandlink> </li>
         </ul>
     </li>
 </ul>
</div>
<!-- end #sidebar -->
<div style="clear: both;">&nbsp;</div>
</div>
<!-- end #page -->
<div style="text-align: center; font-size: 0.75em;">Design downloaded from <a href="http://www.freewebtemplates.com/">free website templates</a>.</div></body>
</html>
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

Apex Class(controller) code is:

public class SFUnearthed
{
Public List<Article__c> latestarticle =new List<Article__c>();
public void pageload()
{
 // Get the current month
 datetime currentdate=system.now();
 Integer currentmonth = currentdate.month();   
 latestarticle = [select Id,name,CreatedDate,Author__c,Category__c,Article_Description__c from Article__c where createdmonth__c=:currentmonth order by createddate limit 100];
}

Public Article__c newarticle;
public List<Article__c> getarticles()
{
 return latestarticle;
}
public void category()
{
 String parameter = System.currentPagereference().getParameters().get('category');
 latestarticle = [select Id,name,CreatedDate,Author__c,Category__c,Article_Description__c from Article__c where category__c=:parameter order by createddate limit 100];
}
public Article__c getarticle()
{
 newarticle = new Article__c();
 return newarticle;
}
public Pagereference SaveArticle()
{
 system.debug('Article description is'+newarticle.Article_Description__c);
 insert newarticle;
 Pagereference articlehome = new Pagereference('/apex/SFUnearthed_Articles');
 return articlehome;
}
Public Pagereference createnewarticle()
{
 Pagereference createarticle= new Pagereference('/apex/SFUnearthed_NewArticle');
 return createarticle;
}      
}

Create a Visualforce page named "SFUnearthed_NewArticle"...

I have a image stored as a Static resource named "SaveArticle"..

Save the above image to your desktop and upload as a static resource with name "SaveArticle" ....
VF code is..

<apex:page controller="SFUnearthed" showheader="false" >

<c:SFUnearthedHeader ></c:SFUnearthedHeader>

<div id="page">


  <apex:form >


    <!--- Copied code from blog edit --->
     <!-- Skin CSS file -->
         <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.3.0/build/assets/skins/sam/skin.css" ></link>

     <!-- Utility Dependencies -->
         <script src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.3.0/build/utilities/utilities.js"></script>

     <!-- Needed for Menus, Buttons and Overlays used in the Toolbar -->
         <script src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.3.0/build/container/container-min.js"></script>
         <script src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.3.0/build/menu/menu-min.js"></script>
         <script src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.3.0/build/button/button-beta-min.js"></script>
     <!-- Source file for Rich Text Editor-->
         <script src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.3.0/build/editor/editor-beta-min.js"></script>
         <div style="position:relative;left:100px;">
        <table cellspacing="7">
         <tr><td style="text-align:right;">Title</td> <td><apex:inputtext value="{!article.Name}"/></td>
         <td style="text-align:right;">Your Name</td><td><apex:inputtext value="{!article.Author__c}"/></td>
         <td> Category </td> <td> <apex:inputfield value="{!article.Category__c}"/></td></tr>
        </table>
         </div>
     <div class="yui-skin-sam" style="display:none" id="editor" align="center" >
         <pre>            
             <apex:commandlink style="position:absolute;left:425px;" action="{!SaveArticle}" onClick="beforeTextSave()"> <apex:image url="{!$Resource.SaveArticle}"/> </apex:commandlink>
             <br/>
             <apex:inputtextarea id="msgpost" cols="500" rows="50" value="{!article.Article_Description__c}"/>
         </pre>
     </div>

 <script type="text/javascript" >
     var myEditor;
     window.onload = function init()
     {
      myEditor = new YAHOO.widget.Editor('{!$Component.msgpost}', {
        height: '400px', width: '722px', dompath: true, animate: true });
      myEditor.render();
      document.getElementById('editor').style.display='';
     }
     function beforeTextSave()
     {
      document.getElementById('{!$Component.msgpost}').value = myEditor.getEditorHTML();
     }

 </script>

<!-- End of copied code from blog edit -->


</apex:form>

</div>
<div style="text-align: center; font-size: 0.75em;">Design downloaded from <a href="http://www.freewebtemplates.com/">free website templates</a>.</div></body>

</apex:page>

Create a Visualforce page named "SFUnearthed_resources"

VF code is..

<apex:page showheader="false">
<apex:form >
<c:SFUnearthedHeader ></c:SFUnearthedHeader>
<div id="page">
 <div id="content">
 <div class="post" >
     <h2 class="title">Salesforce.com Resources and Guides</h2>
     <p class="date">All in one place</p>
     <p class="meta"><em>Last updated on 25 Aug 2009</em></p>
     <div class="entry" style="font-size:30px;">
      <p> Here you can find all resources related to Salesforce.com at one place. All resources are not hosted on this site but rather would be links to other sites.</p>
      <p> <strong> Visualforce </strong></p>
      <p> To get started with Visualforce you will have to download the Visualforce developer's guide from <a href="http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Documentation" target="_blank" >here </a>
          .You can find all resources related to Salesforce.com on this page.</p>
          <p> Once you get started with visualforce,you will find it difficult to refer the PDF for syntax verifications. In such cases you can click on the "Component Reference" link on your page editor to view
           a complete list of all tags with the supported attributes </p>
           <p> It is obvious that you will get stuck at places when you develop applications using visualforce. In such cases post your problem
               on the community forums -<a href="http://community.salesforce.com" target="_blank"> Click Here </a>. Experts from around the world
               will help you find solutions. </p>
       
      </p>
     </div>
 </div>
<div style="text-align: center; font-size: 0.75em;">Design downloaded from <a href="http://www.freewebtemplates.com/">free website templates</a>.</div></body>
</div>
<!-- end #content -->
</apex:form>


</apex:page>

STEP5:

Its done!!!!... Now go to your site detail page and set the visualforce page "SFUnearthed_articles" as the site Home Page..

If you are not sure how to create a site then click here.

My Force.com Site

2009-08-25T09:15:00.000-07:00

Dear All,

As i had mentioned in my previous post, i had finally created a site on the Force.com platform. I couldn't post many articles this month because all of my free time was spent on the site development. I will share all of my source code and experiences here.. but after some rest -:)

Please do visit my site and thanks for your support... Click here

You can also find the link in the sidebar...

Cheers!!

Visualforce Email Template

2009-08-20T02:22:00.000-07:00

Normally we create email templates by navigating to Setup--> Communication Templates --> Email Templates .. Merge fields are used in these templates to display data...

To enable users to create flexible email templates, Visualforce Email templates was introduced.. You can create templates with extensive HTML and Visualforce coding so as to develop some really appealing and effective templates.. But there are some limitations when you create a visualforce email template.. Before going into the limitations let us create a simple template now..

Create a Visualforce Email template by navigating to
Setup --> Communication Templates --> Email Templates --> New Template
Select "Visualforce" in the first step...

Give a tilte,name,Subject for your template. Next select the Receipent type and Related to (Related to denotes the object from which you would want data to be displayed in your Email).. Click "Save".... Remember to check "Available for use" to make your email template available for use in Workflow email alerts and whereever it may be useful....

You will now see the template detail Page... In the "Email template" section click on "Edit Template" button... This will take you to a Visualforce Page editor...

You can also click on "Attach file" button in "Standard Attachments" section to attach a file from your desktop to your email..

Below is a small piece of code... You will have to put this code in the editor that appears when you click on "Edit template" button
Note: I have used "htmlEmailBody" for including HTML tags in my template.. Also, since the "Relatedto" is "Account" i am displaying Account information in my template..

<messaging:emailTemplate subject="Testing Visualforce Email Template" recipientType="User" relatedToType="Account">
<messaging:HtmlEmailBody >
Account Name : {!Relatedto.Name} <br/>
Account Description : {!Relatedto.Description} <br/>
</messaging:htmlEmailBody>
</messaging:emailTemplate>

What you Can...

With Visualforce email templates you can display any data from the related object in any format you wish.. If Relatedtotype =Account you can display any field of the Account and you can also display the related lists of Account .. For ex you can create a datatable with the value="{!Relatedto.Contacts}"... Similarly you can display other related lists...

What you Cannot...

You cannot use the <apex:page> tag inside your Email template.. Having said this you cannot use pageblock, pageblocksection or any other tag which is a child of the <apex:page> tag.. You can use outputfield,outputtext,datatable etc.. Do not attempt too much of styling and formatting for your email templates unless it is extremely necessary because you would'nt know how your email would be rendered by different providers.. Always use simple and standard formatting so that your email displays uniformly across all providers...

Force.com Sites - A sneak peak

2009-08-05T06:01:00.000-07:00

Force.com sites is a new concept released by salesforce. Under this concept, you can create public sites which can be accessed by anyone. You do not need a salesforce username and password to access a site.

Navigate to Set-up --> Develop --> Sites to create a new site. You will first have to register your force.com domain name. This domain name comes appended with the salesforce domain name. For ex: sfunearthed-developer-edition.na5.force.com

Once done, you can now create your site.

Security:

When you create a site , a profile with the name as site label is automatically created. So, users accessing your site would belong to this profile... You can view and edit the profile by clicking on "Public Access Settings" button on the site detail page...

Using this profile you can grant access to objects, fields etc to be visible on the Site.

You will have to create a home page (Visualforce page) to set as the site home page.

After you have done all this, and when you view your site you may not see certain fields. This is mostly because of the security settings. The site profile has to be granted access in the "field level security" settings also. But, the Site profile does not appear in the list of profiles when you navigate to "Field level security". This is how you have to do it...

Navigate to the SITE Profile detail page by clicking on the "Public Access Settings" as shown above...

You can see a section called "Field level Settings"... Click on "View" against the desired object...

Click on "Edit" to edit the field level accessibility settings....

Cloud Developer challenge..

A month ago i signed up for the Cloud Developer challenge, but then i did not have time to create an amazing application nor did i have an idea... I was just longing for an idea and later dropped it...

But then the deadline was extended to August end 09.. by this time i realized that i finally got an idea.. More about that later..

So i signed up for the free 100 User force.com platform.. it was really amazing.. they offer you 1GB of storage free of cost.. the earlier developer editions used to have only 10MB.. 1GB is more than enough for a small organization to host its application on the force.com platform.. and remember "all free"....

I wanted to build an application which would be very colorful with lot of images (in short i wanted the application to have the salesforce look and feel 0%).... I am not an expert in HTML nor CSS but i was sure i knew the fundamentals...

W3Schools was the best and the fast.. U can learn HTML and CSS within hours...

Next, i wanted a template with the Images and all CSS styles.. I did not want to write down everything from scratch.. If you are an expert in that area and if you have experience in working with Dreamweaver or any such tools you can very well do that... These tools actually reduce your web pages development time drastically...

There are hundreds of websites which offer you free web templates... to name a few

http://www.2createawebsite.com/build/templates.html

http://www.freewebtemplates.com/

http://www.templatesbasket.com/

I downloaded a template from one such site.. Now i had all my images, CSS and a sample HTML file... I had to modify the file and insert Visualforce tags wherever applicable...

So, i logged into my force.com platform and created a SITE... Next i created a VisualForce page to use in the Site and OOPS!!! i found out that i couldn't create APEX Classes(Controller/Extension).. I was sure there should be some way out there and i posted it in the community.. And yes, there was a way.. You cannot create an Apex Class directly in the free platform, you will have to develop it in a developer ORG and deploy it into your free platform.. same as how you move code from test to production...

About the application i have started to develop...

I thought of extending this blog by making visitors contribute to this blog as well.. I could be doing something in ten steps which can be done by someone else in three or less steps.. So why not share ideas..

Meanwhile, i found this article very useful. It has been posted by Ron Hess. My application would be an extension upon this...

This article will expand as and when i encounter problems and solutions in my application development....

You can soon see a link in the sidebar pointing to the site :-) ... Hope i can have people to contribute articles...

Standard new/edit page Vs your Visualforce Page

2009-07-30T08:05:00.000-07:00

I just found this stuff to be very exciting and thought would be worth sharing...

I was reading through the forums and found a particular post.. the description is like this..

The "New" button has to be overridden with a Visualforce Page. When the Visualforce page loads some calculations are performed and the user is either redirected to the standard new/edit page or he stays in the same Visualforce page... And the interesting part was the standard new/edit page has to be prefilled with data passed from the visualforce page...

This is how it can be done.. We will take Account as an example.. We will override the Account new button with a visualforce page..

I will create a Visualforce page.. Just a small one

<apex:page standardController="Account" extensions="newvsold" action="{!pageredir}">

</apex:page>

And the Apex class would be..

public class newvsold
{

public newvsold(ApexPages.StandardController controller)
{

}
public Pagereference pageredir()
{
    Pagereference newpage = new Pagereference ('/001/e?retURL=/001/');
    return newpage;
}
}

So go ahead and override your "new" button with the Visualforce page you just created.. Now when you click on "New" button under Accounts what do you observe..

Yes the same old Account new page is displayed.. It is because we call a method in the "action" attribute of the page tag..(If you are unclear about the "action" attribute then read this article here ).. this method redirects the user to the normal new page.. Now let's analyze the URL we have specified in the Pagerefernce...

/001/e?retURL=/001/ --- The number 001 indicates Account, e indicated edit and retURL specifies where to go after hitting any button on the page.. Like 001 for Account all objects have a number.. You can always check it in the URL bar..

I simply did a redirection.. you can add any complex logic there...

Now going to the interesting part.. How will i prepopulate my new page with values.... Here it is

Go to the Account "new" page...

Right-click and select "View Source" or "View Page Source".... and in the window that appears search for "Account Name"...

Now after the place where you see "Account Name" look for "<input" and note the "id"

In our specific case the id is "acc2" which denotes Account Name....

In the url bar just type ... https://yoursalesforceinstance.com/001/e?acc2=test&retURL=/001/

Or you can modify the Apex Code as below...

public class newvsold
{

   public newvsold(ApexPages.StandardController controller)
   {

   }
   public Pagereference pageredir()
   {
       Pagereference newpage = new Pagereference ('/001/e?acc2=test&retURL=/001/');
       return newpage;
   }  
}

"acc2" denotes Account Name.. similarly all fields have own id... and you can pass values for as many fields as you like unless you do not exceed the maximum URL size...

Even though this sounds a very strange method.. i just thought it might help someone somewhere..

Sending an Email from your Apex Class

2009-07-24T01:23:00.000-07:00

There may be situations in which you would not want a workflow email alert, because either your criteria to send an email may be too complex or the person whom you want to send an email has to be determined dynamically..... In such situations you can choose to send an email from a Apex Class...

Sending an email from a Apex Class is so easy... Basically there are two categories

SingleEmailMessage - This is used when you want to send an email to a single person..

MassEmailMessage - This is used when you want to send an email to a group...

First, let us see about the SingleEmailMessage type....

Step1:

Create a Apex Class with the following code....

public class testemail
{
private final Contact con;
public testemail(ApexPages.StandardController controller)
{
this.con=(Contact)controller.getRecord();
}

public void SendEmail()
{
Messaging.SingleEmailMessage mail = new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage();
mail.setTargetObjectId(con.Id);
mail.setTemplateId('00X90000000QHUD');
Messaging.sendEmail(new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage[] { mail });
}
}

Mention a valid Email Template ID in the colored part...

Step 2:

Create a VF page named as "testemail" or anything as your wish , and paste the code below..

<apex:page standardcontroller="Contact" extensions="testemail">
<apex:form>
<apex:commandButton value="Send Email!" action="{!SendEmail}"/>
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

Step 3:

Go to the url bar and type
https://yoursalesforceinstance.com/apx/testemail?id=00390000001TqnV

Note that i have mentioned a valid Contact Id of my organization, make sure you mention a valid contact ID of your SF instance.

Step 4:

You should be able to view the page below

Click on the "Send Email" button and your email is sent to the Email address of the Contact mentioned in the url.....

Analyzing the code.. we can see that four simple lines are enough to send a mail

The first line instantiates an instance of the SingleEmailMessage object...

The second line associates the Contact ID to the email.. this is used to retrieve the toaddress and any merge fields that may be included in your email template...

Note that in the third line we have hardcoded the Email Template ID... This ID belongs to my organization, you will have to replace it with your's...

And in the final step the sendemail method is called and the email is sent...

Template ID

Do you think its weird to hardcode a Template Id in your code.. yes, definitely it is..

There is a EmailTemplate object which you can query and retrieve the template ID you require... below is a small sample which you can plug-in into this example after modifying appropriately..

emailtemplatelist = new List<EmailTemplate>();
for ( EmailTemplate e : [select Id,Name,Subject,body from EmailTemplate where name like :userinputtemplatename+'%'])
{
emailtemplatelist.add(e);
}

Sending an email without a Template -

The above method is used only when you want to associate a Email Template to your email. When you use an Email Template you will have to specify a valid Contact Id, or User Id, or Lead Id as the target Object Id. If you specify any other object's Id your code wouldn't work.

If you do not want to use a template you can specify the toAddress, Subject and Body of the email using the appropriate methods. Below is a piece of code which sends an email not associated to an email template.

 String[] toaddress = new String[]{};
toaddress.add(emailaddress[i]);
Messaging.SingleEmailMessage mail = new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage();
mail.setToAddresses(toaddress);
mail.setsubject(subject);

Hope the methods are self-explanatory...

You have a Email Template but you dont have a Contact,or User,or Lead ????????

There may and will arise situations in which you have a Email Template.. You would not have any merge fields in this Email Template. ..

You would like to send an Email using this Email Template.. But you do not have a Contact, or a Lead or a User to set as the targtObjectId...

In such cases, you can create a Contact on the fly, send the email and then delete the Contact... Remember to create the contact with Name, and Email since these are mandatory fields to send an Email...

Sending Mass Email

Now that you have learnt to use the single email message, the mass email message is much simpler to understand...

You just need to replace the targetobjectId with setTargetObjectIds... And of course, you will have to specify a list of valid Contact,User or Lead ID's...

For the same example, just replace the Apex code as below...

public class testemail
{
  private final List<Id> contactids;
  public List<Contact> con;
  public testemail(ApexPages.StandardController controller)
  {
     con = [select Id from Contact limit 250 ];
     for(Integer i=0;i<250;i++)
     {
         contactids.add(con[i].Id);
      }  
  }

  public void SendEmail()
  {
       Messaging.MassEmailMessage mail = new Messaging.MassEmailMessage();
       mail.setTargetObjectIds(contactids);
       mail.setTemplateId('00X90000000QHUD');
       Messaging.sendEmail(new Messaging.MassEmailMessage[] { mail });
  }  


}

What we do is, query the contact object and get a list of Contact Id's... We then set this list of ID's as the targetobjectId's....

Overriding Standard buttons with Visualforce Page and redirecting based on User

2009-07-22T00:17:00.000-07:00

Overriding a Standard button is pretty straightforward.. but when you override a standard button with a visualforce page all users in your organization would see this page...

So, let's suppose you want one set of users to view a page (for ex: viewpage1) and another set of users to view another page (for ex:viewpage2).

First of all, create the two visualforce pages viewpage1 and viewpage2

Secondly, create a new visualforce page called "viewpageredir". This page would contain the following code...

Note that i have created this page for the "Account" object. I would use this page to override my Account View button. You can use this code for any object by specifying the name of the object in the standardcontroller attribute.

<apex:page showheader="false" action="{!pageredirect}" standardcontroller="Account" extensions="pageredir">

</apex:page>

The Apex Code would be...

public class pageredir
{

public pageredir(ApexPages.StandardController controller) {

}

public Pagereference pageredirect()
{
if (Userinfo.getUserName() == 'testview1@org.com')
{
Pagereference p = Page.viewpage1;
return p;
} 
else
{
Pagereference p = Page.viewpage2;  
return p;
}  
}      
}

Now, let's see how this works.. As you can see "viewpageredir" has only one tag "<apex:page>" . There is no other content in this page as we are using it only to redirect the user to his specific page.

We, have an action attribute in the page. The action method is called when the page loads. This causes the method "pageredirect" to be called. In this page we check the current user's Username. "Userinfo" can not only get the username but also the ID, ProfileId etc. See the Apex Language reference for the entire list.

Based on the username, we redirect the user to the desired page......

Understanding relationships in Salesforce

2009-07-20T03:35:00.000-07:00

Relationship between objects are created when you create a field of type Look-up... Of course, Salesforce standard objects come with their own built-in relationships.. Let's categorize relationships into two categories...

Standard Relationship
Custom Relationship

We all know how a relationship looks like in the UI, for ex: Account - Contact relationship. You can see that one Account can have many Contacts associated to it . When you create or edit a Contact you will have to select a Account from the look-up dialog to establish a relationship...

Now, that's all what we know.. But at the database level there is much more to be explored..

Standard Relationship

Standard relationships are the one's that come pre-built between Standard objects in Salesforce.

Let's understand the Account-Contact relationship.. In Contact you can find a field called Account.. This field establishes the relationship.. When you view a Contact record you will see the Account Name populated in this field... But guess what, that is not actually stored in the database..

The ID of the Account is stored in the look-up field. Hence, all look-up fields would store the ID.

Here is how the actual database fields are....

AccountId - This stores the ID of the Account.
Account -- This stores the relationship of the Account.

So, here come's the interesting part. By using the "Account" relationship you can access any field of the associated Account.

[Select Account.Name,Account.BillingCity from Contact]

And what more, you can retrieve data from a relationship to a relationship as well...

[Select Account.Name,Account.BillingCity,Account.Owner.Name from Contact]

So, they can be multi-level....

What's the advantage??

The better you understand relationships, the better you can construct complex nested queries and try to minimize the number of queries used.

Custom Relationship:

This is same as the standard relationship except that the naming convention has some differences...

THE __c and __r :

In our same example, if we create a custom Account look-up field on Contact and name it as CustomAccount... then accessing the relationship is as follows...

CustomAccount__c --> Equivalent of AccountId, holds the ID of the Account.

CustomAccount__r --> Equivalent of Account, holds the relationship

Our example query will modify as below..

[Select CustomAccount__r.Name,CustomAccount__r.BillingCity,CustomAccount__r.Owner.Name from Contact]

Wondering how i came to know about this and where will you find more details on this????

Go to Setup--> Develop --> API and click on "Generate Enterprise WSDL"

The WSDL shows the actual way data is stored, the actual field names, the actual relationships etc...

Getter and setter methods - What are they??

2009-07-14T09:18:00.000-07:00

Well, once you start using a controller or an extension you will get used to these words...

So, it is good that we understand what these methods really do..

Getter and setter methods are used to pass data from your visualforce page to your controller and vice versa..

Let's take a very simple scenario... Let's assume you want to display a textbox in your visualforce page.. When the user enters some value in this textbox and clicks on a button you want the value entered by the user in your Apex class (ie. basically your controller or extension)

So go ahead and create a simple visualforce page.. the code for this would be

<apex:page controller="simplegetset">
  <apex:form>
    <apex:outputlabel value="Enter your name here"/>
       <apex:inputtext value="{!userinput}"/>          
  </apex:form>    
</apex:page>

The Apex code for this page would be...

public class simplegetset
{
    public String userinput{get; set;}
}

Now, the variable "userinput" in your Apex class will store the value entered by the user....

Let's analyze the methods now...

Get

The "get" method is used to pass data from your Apex code to your Visualforce page.. In our example we are not passing any value.. hence, when your page loads initially the textbox will have a empty value...

So, lets modify our code and pass a default value to the textbox.. Change the Apex code as follows..

public class simplegetset
{  
    public String userinput;
    public String getuserinput(){return 'John';}
   
    public void setuserinput(String userinput)
    {
        this.userinput = userinput;
    }   
}

You can now see that your page loads with a value 'John'...

Set

The "set" method is used to pass values from your visualforce page to the controller... In our example the variable "userinput" will be storing the value entered in the textbox..

Now modify your VF page as below..

<apex:page controller="simplegetset">
  <apex:form>
    <apex:outputlabel value="Enter your name here"/>
       <apex:inputtext value="{!userinput}">
           <apex:actionsupport event="onclick" rerender="display" />
       </apex:inputtext>                   
    <apex:outputpanel id="display">
        <apex:outputtext value="The name entered is {!userinput}"/>
    </apex:outputpanel>                   
  </apex:form>    
</apex:page>

The Apex code would be...

public class simplegetset
{
    public String userinput{get; set;}
}

In this example what happens is.. the variable "userinput" stores the value entered in visualforce page and passes it to the Apex code.. hence you are able to see the entered value in the visualforce page..

I guess you might understand what i am saying.. to make things simple now use the same visualforce page.. but modify the Apex code as below..

public class simplegetset
{  
    public String userinput;
    public String getuserinput(){return 'John';}
   
    public void setuserinput(String userinput)
    {
        this.userinput = userinput;
    }   
}

Now, whatever value you enter the page always displays "The name entered is John".... This is because your get method always returns 'John'... but still your set method will store the value you entered in the variable "userinput"....

Hope i did not confuse...

Zip file as Static Resource ( CSS Styling )

2009-07-08T06:06:00.000-07:00

I finally realized what a blunder i have made by hardcoding the URL of images in my CSS file. Everytime i move my code from one instance to another the URL keeps on changing and i have to manually edit each and every URL.....

But i found out that there was a very very easy way out there... Thanks to the community forums

This is the way you have to use CSS in your visualforce pages..

Step 1: Create a zip file of the CSS file with the Associated images..

Example: If you have a CSS called mystylings.css and all images used in the CSS are inside a folder called "Images", then create a folder containing both "mystylings.css" and "Images" folder... Suppose you name the folder as "mystylings"...

Create a zip file of the folder "mystylings"...

No need to change the image URL as i have mentioned here.

Suppose you name the zip file as "stylings.zip".

Step 2: Now upload this zip file as it is in Static Resources. Name the resource as "stylings" for example.

Step 3: Now you can access the "mystylings.css" file in your visualforce page as below.....

<apex:stylesheet value="{!URLFOR($Resource.stylings,'mystylings/mystylings.css')}"/>

Note that we have specified mystylings/mystylings.css ... This is because we created a folder called "mystylings" and the file "mystylings.css" resides inside this folder....

That's it and you are done... You can move your Visualforce Page with CSS across environments without changing the CSS

Customized search and selection (Add multiple child records at one go)

2009-07-04T21:08:00.000-07:00

Scenario:

You want your users to be able to make a customized search and not the way salesforce searches. You also would like to allow your users to select multiple records from the search results and process them.

If the user does not select any record and clicks on the Next button you want to display an Error Message asking him to select at least one record to proceed.

Tip: You may be aware that salesforce allows only one child to be added to a parent at a time. Even though some wizards allow you to mass assign child records to a parent, this is not available for all objects. Modifying this code, you can achieve the functionality of selecting many child records and assigning them to a parent at one click!!!

The screenshots below clearly expresses the scenario...

Before search..

After search...

Note:

The following code searches for contacts based on the user inputs. Customize it as needed for your needs. Also, this code is called from a custom button on the Campaign Page Layout.

Javascript function :
We also make use of a javascript function to select all records at one go.

The code has suffecient comments to describe about each and every functionality. Do you think you need more info, then feel free to post your comment.

How to use this code?

Save the "Apex Class" first. Save the Visualforce page next.
Create a custom button in Campaign, select the source as "Visualforce Page" and select the visualforce page just now saved.
Go to PageLayout and add your newly created custom button to this layout.
Click on any Campaign Record, go to the detail page and then click on the custom button to view the page created.

Visualforce code:

<apex:page standardcontroller="Campaign" extensions="MassEmailFromCampaign" >
<!-- Javascript function to check all rows in the table -->
<script>
function checkAll(cb)
{
   var inputElem = document.getElementsByTagName("input");
   for(var i=0;i<inputElem.length;i++)
     {
             if(inputElem[i].id.indexOf("selectLine1")!=-1)
                   inputElem[i].checked = cb.checked;
      }
}
</script>
<!-- End of Javascript function -->
<apex:form >
<apex:sectionHeader title="Step 1" subtitle="Select Contacts to send Email"/>
<apex:pageblock >
<apex:pageBlockSection title="Search Contacts" columns="1"></apex:pageBlockSection>

<!-- Div to give a colored box effect -->

<div style="border-width:2px;border-style:solid;border-color:orange;">

    <!-- Panel grid to display boxes o accept user input values -->
    <apex:panelGrid columns="2">
        <apex:outputLabel style="font-weight:bold;" value="Contact E-mail" ></apex:outputLabel>
        <apex:inputText value="{!userinput}"/>
        <apex:outputLabel style="font-weight:bold;" value="Contact Name" ></apex:outputLabel>
        <apex:inputText value="{!userinp}"/>
    </apex:panelGrid>
    <!-- End of panelgrid -->
    <!-- Div to position the commandbutton appropriately -->
        <div style="position:relative;left:75px;">
             <apex:commandButton value="Search" action="{!contactsearch}" />
        </div>
    <!-- End of div -->
        <br/>
</div>

<!-- End of colored box div -->
    <br/>
<!-- Display error message -->
<apex:pagemessage strength="2" title="Error!!" severity="error" detail="Please select a contact or enter email address to proceed" rendered="{!errormsg}"/>
<!-- End of error message -->

<!-- Display search results -->
<apex:pageblocksection columns="1" title="Search results" rendered="{!NOT(ISNULL(results))}" >
  <apex:outputpanel id="Contactlist">

        <apex:pageBlockTable value="{!results}" var="contacts">
             <apex:column >
                <apex:facet name="header">
                    <apex:inputCheckbox onclick="checkAll(this)"/>
                </apex:facet>
                    <apex:inputCheckbox value="{!contacts.selected}" id="selectLine1"/>
            </apex:column>
            <apex:column headervalue="Contact Name">
                <apex:outputtext value="{!contacts.con.Name}"/>
            </apex:column>
            <apex:column headervalue="Account Name">
                <apex:outputtext value="{!contacts.con.Account.Name}"/>
            </apex:column>
            <apex:column headervalue="Title">
                <apex:outputtext value="{!contacts.con.Title}"/>
            </apex:column>
        </apex:pageBlockTable>  <br/><br/>

    </apex:outputpanel>
</apex:pageblocksection>
<!-- End of search results -->

<!-- Commandbutton to proceed to next screen -->
  <div style="position:relative;left:75px;">
      <apex:commandButton value="Next" action="{!processSelected}"/>
      <apex:commandbutton value="Cancel" action="{!Cancel}"/>
  </div>
<!-- End of Commandbutton -->
</apex:pageblock>
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

The Apex code for this page will be...

public class MassEmailFromCampaign {

/* Constructor Function. The campaign id is captured in this function */
public MassEmailFromCampaign(ApexPages.StandardController controller)
{
 cid=System.currentPageReference().getParameters().get('id');
}
/* Variable declarations */

Public String cid;                                                            // Stroes Campaign Id
public List<cContact> contactList {get; set;}                                 // Wrapper class which stores contact data and a boolean flag.
public Boolean selectAllCheckbox {get; set;}                                  // Stores checkbox data.
public boolean errormsg=false;                                                // Error msg. When no contact has been selected.
String userinput;                                                             // Contact Email
String userinp;                                                               // Contact Name

Public boolean displayboxes;

Public List<Contact> results = new List<Contact>();                                     // Contact search results.
Public List<Contact> selectedContactsstep2 = new List<Contact>();             // Selcted Contacts


/* End of Variable declarations */

/* Getter and setter methods for getting the user input ie. Contact name and email from the UI */

public String getuserinput(){return userinput;}
public void setuserinput(String userinp){this.userinput=userinp;}
public String getuserinp(){return userinp;}
public void setuserinp(String userinp){this.userinp=userinp;}


/*End of Getter and Setter methods */



/* Method to Search the contact database to fetch the query results */
public List<Contact> contactsearch()
{
     errormsg=false;
     contactList = new List<cContact>();
     for(Contact c : [select Account.Name,Name,FirstName,LastName,Email,title,Id from Contact where Email like :userinput+'%' and Name like :userinp+'%'])
     {
         contactList.add(new cContact(c));
     }

 return null;
}
/* End of method */


/* Method for returning the contact search results to the UI */
public List<cContact> getresults()
{

 return contactList;

}
/* End of Method */


/* Wrapper class to contain contact record and a boolean flag */
public class cContact
{
 public Contact con {get; set;}
 public Boolean selected {get; set;}

 /*This is the contructor method. When we create a new cContact object we pass a
 Contact that is set to the con property. We also set the selected value to false*/
 public cContact(Contact c)
 {
     con = c;
     selected = false;
 }
}
/* end of Wrapper class */


/* Method to fetch the selected records and send email to them */
public PageReference processSelected()
{

  List<Contact> selectedContacts = new List<Contact>();
  if (contactList!= null)
  {
     for(cContact cCon : getresults()){
        if(cCon.selected == true){
             selectedContacts.add(cCon.con);
         }
     }

     selectedContactsstep2=selectedContacts;
  }
 /* return error message if no contact is selected */
 if (selectedcontacts.size()==0)
 {
     errormsg=true;
     return null;
 }
 else
 {
     errormsg=false;
     String id=System.currentpagereference().getparameters().get('id');
     Pagereference p=new Pagereference ('/apex/MassEmailFromCampaignStep2');
     return p;
 }

}
public List<SelectOption> getItems()
{
 List<SelectOption> options = new List<SelectOption>();
 options.add(new SelectOption('YES','YES'));
 options.add(new SelectOption('NO','NO'));
 return options;
}


/* return error message if no contact is selected */
public boolean geterrormsg()
{
 return errormsg;
}


/* Method to cancel the entire process */
public Pagereference Cancel()
{
        Pagereference p =new Pagereference('/'+cid);
        return p;
}
       

}

Note that, "selectedcontacts" is the variable which holds the contacts you have selected. Use this for further processing. I have just redirected to another visualforce page, you can do your own stuff...

Post your queries....

Visualforce Page with CSS

2009-07-02T09:13:00.000-07:00

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. This is nothing but a text file saved with the extension .css

This file will contain all the style defenitions for your visualforce page. To know the basics of styling your visualforce page visit this post.

Scenario 1:

We are going to take a very simple scenario. You want all your <h1> tags to appear in GREEN color.

Step 1:

Create a CSS file.

Open NOTEPAD or any text editor and type the following code

h1
{
color:green;
}

Save the file with a .css extension (say CssExample.css)

Step 2:

Upload the saved file as a Static resource.

Setup -> Develop -> Static Resources and click on NEW.

Give a name for the static resource say CssExample. Remeber to set the Cache Control as "Public".

Step 3:

Create a visualforce page and paste the following code..

<apex:page standardstylesheets="false" showheader="false">
<apex:stylesheet value="{!$Resource.CssExample}"/>
<h1> This text is displayed using CSS </h1>
</apex:page>

Save the page. Now you can see that the text within <h1> tag is displayed in GREEN color because you have specified so in the CSS file.

TiP: Remove showheader="false" and you can see that the text is displayed in normal size and not h1. This is because the header uses standard salesforce style sheets and your visualforce page is still overridden with this even if you say ' standardstylesheets="false" '. To overcome this use font-size:15px or whatever it maybe.

Scenario 2:

Now lets modify the CSS. We will have two commandbuttons and one commandlink. We will add a background color and text color to one button and a different color to another button. We will also change the color of commandlink.

Modify the CSS as below...

h1
{
color:green;
}
.button1
{
background-color:#00FF00;
font-weight:bold;
color:#E56717;
}
.button2
{
background-color:#C12283;
font-weight:bold;
color:#EE9A4D;
}
a:hover
{
color:#F665AB;
}
a
{
color:#52D017;
font-size:20px;
}

Upload the modified CSS into Static resource. You can edit the already created static resource CssExample and just choose the latest file from your desktop.

Modify the Visualforce page as below..

<apex:page standardstylesheets="false" showHeader="false">
<apex:form >
    <apex:stylesheet value="{!$Resource.CssExample}"/>
    <h1> This text is displayed using CSS </h1>
        <apex:commandButton styleclass="button1" value="Click Me!"/>
        <apex:commandButton styleclass="button2" value="Click Me!"/>
        <apex:commandlink value="Clik me!"/>
    </apex:form>
</apex:page>

Now you can see the different colours that we have applied...

Look at the CSS code carefully. We have two classes button1 and button2 with their style defenitions (note that .button1 is the way the classes have to be defined in CSS).

When your Visualforce page is finally rendered as HTML commandlink tag will be converted to <a> tag. That's why we define the colors for "a" in CSS. a:hover represents the styling to be used when you move your mouse on the commandlink..

Scenario 3:

The method i am describing below is the most inefficient one. I later discovered that there is a very easy way... You can find it here

Sorry for the inconvenience.. but still i thought mentioning the below method maybe of use somewhere

Specifying a background image in the CSS. We will add a background image to the commandbutton and more styling effects.. Save the following images to your desktop.

(bg_button_a.gif) Right-click and Save Image As

(bg_button_span.gif) Right-click and Save Image As

Now we have the CSS code as below..

.clear { /* generic container (i.e. div) for floating buttons */
  overflow: hidden;
  width: 100%;
}

a.button {
  background: transparent url('bg_button_a.gif') no-repeat scroll top right;
  color: #444;
  display: block;
  float: left;
  font: normal 12px arial, sans-serif;
  height: 24px;
  margin-right: 6px;
  padding-right: 18px; /* sliding doors padding */
  text-decoration: none;
}

a.button span {
  background: transparent url('bg_button_span.gif') no-repeat;
  display: block;
  line-height: 14px;
  padding: 5px 0 5px 18px;
}
a.button:active {
  background-position: bottom right;
  color: #000;
  outline: none; /* hide dotted outline in Firefox */
}

a.button:active span {
  background-position: bottom left;
  padding: 6px 0 4px 18px; /* push text down 1px */
}

The colored parts in the code refer to the URL of the images. When you upload this CSS to Salesforce, the URL is no longer valid. Hence the CSS has to be modified.

Upload the two images into SFDC as static resources (Save the first one as ButtonBg and the second one as ButtonBgSpan for example). View the details of the static resource created. Click on "Click here to view this file".

After you click the image opens up in a new window/tab. Now check the URL. For me the URL was

https://ap1.salesforce.com/resource/1246616624000/ButtonBgSpan

You have to copy the coloured part of the URL and paste it in the CSS . Do it for the two files uploaded. Now the modified CSS looks like this...

.clear
{ /* generic container (i.e. div) for floating buttons */
   overflow: hidden;
   width: 100%;
}

a.button {
   background: transparent url('/resource/1246616564000/ButtonBg') no-repeat scroll top right;
   color: #444;
   display: block;
   float: left;
   font: normal 12px arial, sans-serif;
   height: 24px;
   margin-right: 6px;
   padding-right: 18px; /* sliding doors padding */
   text-decoration: none;
}

a.button span
{
   background: transparent url('/resource/1246616624000/ButtonBgSpan') no-repeat;
   display: block;
   line-height: 14px;
   padding: 5px 0 5px 18px;
}
a.button:active
{
   background-position: bottom right;
   color: #000;
   outline: none; /* hide dotted outline in Firefox */
}

a.button:active span
{
   background-position: bottom left;
   padding: 6px 0 4px 18px; /* push text down 1px */
}

Upload this updated CSS . You can edit your already created Static resource CssExample and just choose the latest file from your desktop.

The Visualforce page code will be..

<apex:page standardstylesheets="false" showHeader="false">
   <apex:form >
       <apex:stylesheet value="{!$Resource.CssExample}"/>
           <apex:commandlink styleclass="button"><span> Save </span> </apex:commandlink>
           <apex:commandlink styleclass="button"><span> Cancel </span> </apex:commandlink>
       </apex:form>  
</apex:page>

That's it... Now you can see the effects you have just created

Comments and suggestions welcome!!

Visualforce Page Styling - some useful stylings

2009-07-01T02:41:00.000-07:00

I found some style specifications which i thought would be worth sharing...

Here it is..

Positioning

Get Rid of   for adding white spaces to your Visualforce Page. Here is a better way of doing it..

<div style="position:relative;left:75px;">

Left specifies how many pixels from the left of the screen should the component be displaced. Right,top,bottom also can be used..

Put your Visualforce tags inside this div.

To draw a coloured box(container) to place components inside it

<div style="border-width:2px;border-style:solid;border-color:orange;">

Visualforce tags placed inside this div will appear with a orange coloured box.

Remove Blue Border around images as links in IE:

IE displays a blue border around images to denote that it is a link. To remove it use the following code

a img {border-style: none; }

color:transparent does not work in IE:

IE does not recognize this property, whereas Firefox and Safari does. To overcome this, use the following code.

a span{
            visibility:hidden;
         }

Check this article for the complete description ... Click here . Check the bottom most part of the article for a full example.

Style your VisualForce Pages -for newbies

2009-06-29T03:34:00.000-07:00

VisualForce offers the ability to customize the look and feel of your VisualForce Pages. This guide is intended to cover the methodologies to be followed, and some best practices while implementing your own look and feel.

Getting Started:

<apex:page>is the topmost tag in any VisualForce Page. This tag determines the styles to be used in your VisualForce pages. Let us start by creating a simple page with some basic styles.

<apex:page showheader="false" sidebar="false">
<apex:form>
<h1> This is my first VisualForce Page! </h1>
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

Let’s walk through the code line by line

<apex:page showheader="false" sidebar="false">

When you set showheader=”false” the sidebar is also removed by default, however when you set sidebar=”false” header will still display (obviously J )

The point to note here is when the header is removed Salesforce default stylesheets is no longer applied. Hence if you paste ordinary HTML code it will work perfectly.

One step further…..

Let’s modify the code and add a button..

<apex:page showheader="false" sidebar="false">
<apex:form>
<h1> This is my first VisualForce Page! </h1>
<apex:commandButton value="Done"></apex:commandButton>
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

What did you notice? You’re right, the size of the text has reduced when you have not done anything to it. Why is this so?

It is because we have used <apex:commandbutton> tag. This causes salesforce Standard stylesheets to be used. Not only this tag, but there are many others which cause a conflict. Hey!!, don’t worry there’s a way out there.

<apex:page showheader="false" sidebar="false" standardstylesheets=”false”>

This will remove the salesforce standard stylesheets and you can now use your own styles without any worries. But, of course there are many more problems to be faced…

Now lets add some color and effects…

<apex:page showheader="false" sidebar="false">
<apex:form>
<h1 style="text-align:center;color:blue;">
This is my first VisualForce Page! </h1>
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

This is called INLINE STYLING, it is called so because we have used style=” “ attribute inside the <h1> tag.

When not to use INLINE STYLING????

Suppose if you have ten <h1> tags in your page and you want all the text displayed in BLUE. Ideally you would have to add INLINE styles in all your ten <h1> tags.

To overcome this, we use <style> tag. We will modify our previous example using <style> tag.

<apex:page showheader="false" sidebar="false">
<style>
h1
{
text-align:center;
color:blue;
}
</style>
<apex:form>
<marquee> <h1>
This is my first VisualForce Page! </h1>
</marquee>
<h1> This text is displayed without INLINE styles </h1>   
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

USING STYLECLASS

How about a more complicated page with styleclass, adding many styles into a single holder is called a styleclass. You can then use the styleclass anywhere in your page

<apex:page showheader="false" sidebar="false">
<apex:page showheader="false" sidebar="false" standardcontroller="Account" standardstylesheets="false">
<style>
.red
{
background-color:red;
}
.green
{
background-color:green;
}
.blue
{
background-color:blue;
}
</style> 
<apex:form >
<h1 style="text-align:center;color:blue;">  This is my first VisualForce Page! </h1>
<apex:datatable value="{!Account.Contacts}" var="con" border="1" cellspacing="5" cellpadding="5" columnClasses="red,green,blue">
<apex:column headervalue="Contact FirstName"> <apex:outputfield value="{!con.FirstName}"/> </apex:column>
<apex:column headervalue="Contact LastName"> <apex:outputfield value="{!con.LastName}"/> </apex:column>
<apex:column headervalue="Contact Name"> <apex:outputfield value="{!con.Title}"/> </apex:column>
</apex:datatable>    
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

Here when you say columnclasses="red,green,blue" in <apex:datatable> itag it means that the styleclass "red" would be applied for the first column, "green" would be applied for the second column and "blue" would be applied for the third column. When you have a fourth column "red" styleclass would be applied again, because it works in a repetitive fashion. You can use as many classses as you need for any number of columns.

That’s it for you to get started..

The next step is using CSS in your visualforce pages. Here it is!! Click here!!

Passing parameters to a visualforce page and between pages

2009-06-24T09:31:00.001-07:00

Many a times you would want to pass parameters to a visualforce page..

Well, there are two situations in which you would want this.. One is when you want to pass parameters on the click of a custom button.. Other is when you want to pass parameters from one visualforce page to another....

Situation 1

You will see that when you create a custom button and select the source as visualforce page you would see only the page selection and no other option... Well there is a work around for this..

Select the content source as URL and not visualforce... Then you can type the URL as \apex\yourpage.. And what more you can now pass as many parameters as you need using merge fields... There is one more advantage in this method.. You are not forced to use a standard controller with an extension just for your page to appear in the list when you actually do not need a standard controller..

Situation 2

When you want to pass parameters between visualforce pages use the <apex:param> tag....

Here is a small sample program

Step 1: First we create a Visualforce page called SamplePage1....

<apex:page >
<apex:outputlink value="/apex/SamplePage2"> Click Here <apex:param name="msg" value="success"/> </apex:outputlink>
</apex:page>

Step 2: Save this page and now click on " Click Here" link. You will see that when you click on the link you will navigate to a new page called SamplePage2. Check the URL now..

https://na5.salesforce.com/apex/SamplePage2?msg=success

You can see that the parameter " msg" with value "success" has been passed to the new page.

Now, how will you retrieve this value in your APEX CLASS for processing.... see below....

Step3: We will put the following code in our SamplePage2

<apex:page controller="Sampleclass"> </apex:page>

The Apex Class code would be

public class Sampleclass
{
Public String message = System.currentPagereference().getParameters().get('msg');
}

So now, the variable "message" would store the value of your parameter "msg"....

How to Cover this code in TEST Method?????

public class Sampleclass
{
Public String message = System.currentPagereference().getParameters().get('msg');
public static testmethod void SampleclassTest()
{
System.currentPagereference().getParameters().put('msg','success');
}
}

And at last some suggestions...

Be careful with the values you pass in the URL.. Special Characters will cause problems
when passed in the URL.. For ex if you pass the Account Name "Shah & shah".. this would'nt
pass properly as the special character "&" cant get into the URL..

So as a best practice always pass ID's.. you can write a query and retrieve any other field
in the APEX Class