Lightning Experience / Lightning UI:

• Lightning Experience can be turned ON at the profile level, or for individual users using permission sets.
• ALL standard profiles are lightning UI enabled by default, when you enable Lightning UI for your organization. [Workaround: Replace standard profiles with custom profiles]
• Visualforce pages work as usual in the lightning UI, however you might want to do a sanity check to make sure nothing is broken.
• Visualforce pages open with the old look and feel. The old look and feel is referred to as Salesforce Classic.

Where to learn more?

There are tons of resources in trailhead. Collect your badges and learn the fun way.

https://developer.salesforce.com/trailhead/trail/lex_admin_migration

Lightning Design System:

Lightning Design system is a front end framework for developing web applications. Using the Lightning Design system you could design visualforce pages or standalone web pages that look and feel the same way as the Lightning UI. A few pointers.

• Lightning Design system could be though of as an equivalent to 'Twitter Bootstrap'.
• To download and start using visit https://www.lightningdesignsystem.com/
• The design system is purely made up of CSS files.
• The design system comes with pre-built components such as pop-up modals, tree structure, buttons etc.
• Lightning Design system focuses mainly on the front end. Data manipulation and processing will still be done using Apex and Visualforce/other desired markup language.

Where to learn more?

 Trailhead again. Use this trail to learn more https://developer.salesforce.com/trailhead/module/lightning_design_system

Lightning App Builder:

The Lightning App builder is a drag and drop tool to build lightning pages. Salesforce offers a few components by default, including 'Recent Items', 'Assistant', 'List View' etc. In addition you can create your own custom components using the Lightning Design system, or use third party components supplied by AppExchange applications like SKuid

Access from SetUp -> Lightning App Builder

ONLINE Course:

Aimed at providing an introduction to Salesforce from a beginner perspective, this course is FREE for all to signup. Please use the link below to register and complete the course.

Salesforce for Beginners

More online courses coming up, stay tuned....

LIVE One-On-One Courses:

Aimed at providing a personal training experience, this webinar based training provides personalized training for your specific needs. Please fill the form below to know more about fees, class duration and topics covered.

LIVE Meeting Training

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-35003353

If you haven't still heard about it, severe floods have lashed Chennai (a southern city in INDIA). The rains have left thousands homeless and completely paralyzed the transport system and network connectivity of the city. These pictures say for themselves the helpless state of the people.

HOW CAN YOU HELP?

If you are in India, please use this bank account details to transfer funds.

#ChennaiMicroFund contribution A/c Name: V Trust, A/C NO: 533102010503421, UNION BANK OF INDIA, IFSC CODE: UBIN0553310. #ChennaiMicro

— Siddharth (@Actor_Siddharth) December 3, 2015

If you would like to supply relief materials to volunteers at the ground level, Please reach out to the twitter handle @RJ_Balaji

Plz bring ur contributions mainly blankets,mats,candle,mosquito coil and food. We av volunteers 24/7 in big fm to collect.

— RJ Balaji (@RJ_Balaji) December 3, 2015

 Let's do our bit!!

A Custom Metadata type is similar to Custom Settings. However, there are a few distinct factors that make it even more attractive.

• When you deploy 'Custom Metadata', the associated data you created against it is also deployed to the target organization.
• Deploying Custom settings only deploys the metadata, you will have to manually upload data into the custom setting post deployment.
• With Custom Metadata, you can issue unlimited SOQL queries against them. 
• Moreover, custom metadata fields are manageable, meaning that you can upgrade them from the developer organization.
• This feature is particularly useful for AppExchange applications which previously used Custom Objects / Custom Settings to store preferences and settings.

It is important to understand how approval email notifications work in Salesforce.com, particularly when you are mass submitting/re-assigning approval requests. You might want to avoid unpleasant situations wherein users are flooded with email notifications in their inbox. This article tries to point out the various options available to avoid such situations.

How does Salesforce send an email to the approver when a request is submitted?

How to stop email notifications while mass submitting/reassigning approval requests?

There might be situations wherein System Administrators are required to mass transfer pending approval requests. This article is aimed at providing the various options available.

As a word of advice, please be CAREFUL before you do the mass reassignment as this will trigger EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS to the new assignee's.

Option 1: Transfer to a User

This is straightforward as shown below. Note that you can mass recall approval requests from this page as well. Also, you do not have the option to transfer to a Queue.


Option 2: Transfer to a Queue

In a bid to combine all posts of this blog into one single space, I am starting to put these together in a e-book format. You can enroll and see the complete course here https://www.openlearning.com/courses/salesforceforall as it progresses. It's FREE.

Feel free to leave feedback, and any topics you think should be included. Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

***********************************************************************************

Salesforce for All - Chapter One : Introduction

Today, Salesforce unveiled the NEW.

Here is a sneak peak of the features first hand.

Video Credits: Brian Kwong
                             

Report & Dashboards:

Opportunity:

Account:

And there is a whole lot NEW for developers. Lightning components is the NEW world.

This article is out of the blue and not related to the technical stuff i usually write about. I am writing this hoping that it might help someone make a informed decision.

A real estate company in Bangalore, Dreamz Infra Pvt Ltd (http://www.dreamzinfra.com/) promises to sell apartment homes for very cheap prizes. If you are considering buying an apartment from them, I would suggest you ponder over these points before you make a decision. I hope that this post will attract honest reviews from those who purchased/tried to purchase with the company.

The prices of the apartment are unbelievably cheap. Compare with the market rates and you will notice that there is a sharp difference.

There is an unbelievable large number of positive reviews for Dreamz Infra. There are even blogs created by employees of Dreamz Infra like this one.

Note that all comments are positive reviews.

Now, the contrasting part is that their Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/DreamzInfra?fref=ts) is nothing but filled with negative reviews. Note that customer support hasn't responded to any negative review, whereas positive reviews are liked or commented at.

I used https://web.archive.org to see what content they had on their website historically. I was surprised to see that the projects listed in 2012 in Electronics city are neither seen in the completed list nor do they show up in the current projects list.

Dreamz Infra projects today in Electronics city

STEP 1:

STEP 2:

STEP 3:

STEP 4:  

STEP 5:

 STEP 9:

STEP 10:

STEP 11:

STEP 12:

STEP 13:

STEP 14:

STEP 15:

      1. Place package.xml in the folder 'Retrieve Package'
      2. from CMD run 'ant retrieve'
      3. Folder 'deploy' is created.
      4. To validate change edit build.xml and make 'checkonly = true'.
      5. To deploy make checkonly = 'false' and from CMD run 'ant deploy'
      6. Rename the 'deploy' folder and copy to 'completed' folder for history tracking.
      7. Delete the 'deploy' folder

You might get this Error fairly frequently when developing complex Apex Triggers. In this article, we will look at the causes and possible solutions to address the issue.

What?

This error message typically means that the Apex Trigger is taking too long to execute. The maximum CPU time for a trigger is 10,000 milliseconds or 10 seconds. Note that the time taken for DML and SOQL operations does not fall into this category. 

Why?

When you get this error, it DOES NOT mean that you have too many DML operations or large SOQL queries. Rather, it means that there is a problem in the way you handle the result of those operations.

Things to check

1. Try using a MAP instead of a LIST. A MAP is always much efficient to use.
2. Try to avoid iterations or FOR loops wherever possible.
3. Check your nested FOR Loops. This is one MAJOR area which consume too much time. Try to minimize the iterations.

Ever faced a situation when you wanted to deploy a bunch of fields or page layouts and the Apex Tests execution would take hours and hours to complete?.

A recent feature 'Quick Deploy' enables you to skip Apex Test execution when you deploy. However, you will have to run the validation which executes test cases.

The feature does reduce the deployment time by half, since traditionally test cases were executed both during 'Validation' and 'Deployment'.

Here's the official release note from Salesforce http://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring15/release-notes/rn_quick_deployment_ga.htm. The feature is Generally Available and does not require any activation.

This blog post is an extension of a previous blog post (http://www.forcetree.com/2011/09/radiobutton-in-datatable-in-visualforce.html).

The code below explains the way to retain the RADIO button selection on a Visualforce page.

SCREENSHOT:



Apex Class:


Visualforce Page:

Screenshot:


The example below illustrates the way to REMOVE any given row in a table in visualforce and ADD new rows.

The REMOVE button only removes the contact from the UI.
The REMOVED rows are deleted from the database when the "SAVE Changes" button is clicked.

To execute this example include a valid Account ID in the URL as below

https://na5.salesforce.com/apex/deleteRowsExample?id=0017000000UIvsg

VF PAGE: deleteRowsExample

Apex Controller: deleteRowsExample

The Profile Page of Salesforce Chatter can be customized to add additional TAB's. Here are the steps to do it. WEB TAB's and Visualforce TAB's can be added to the Profile page allowing to embed visualforce pages into the standard chatter profile page. Standard TAB's cannot be added.

STEP 1:

Navigate to Setup -> Create -> Apps


STEP 2:

Edit the 'Profile (Self)' and select the TAB's to add. In this case you can see that I have added the 'iSalesforce' TAB.

 

STEP 3:

This is the way it displays finally.

This article is a simple explanation of the use of the Site.Login() Apex method. The documentation in detail from Salesforce is here http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/apexcode/Content/apex_classes_sites.htm.

STEP 1:
Enable Communities by going to the below path, Your Name -> Setup ->  App Setup -> Customize -> Communities -> Settings




STEP 2:
Create a new Community as shown below



STEP 3:
Create a Apex Class as shown below


Note: Replace 'null' with the URL to be redirected to after login.

STEP 4:

Create a Visualforce page 'CustomLoginPage' as shown below



STEP 5:
Navigate to Manage Communities from the setup menu, and click the 'Force.com' link as below



STEP 6:

Make the following changes as shown below.

STEP 7:

Modify the Apex Class 'CommunitiesLoginController' as below



STEP 8:

Modify the Visualforce page 'CommunitiesLogin' as below



STEP 9:

Make sure you publish the community. Navigate to the URL and you should see the custom login page as below.

A wrapper class is simply put a class which wraps variables of different data types into one single type.

We use List(account), List(string), List(integer) etc. But, what do you do when you want to create a list of all these three data types into one single list? That is when a wrapper class comes into help. Below is a simple code snippet to help understand this concept.

VF Page: 

Apex Class: 

Analyzing the code:

 The Wrapper Class in our example is named 'sampleWrapperClass'. Every wrapper class has two parts. One part to declare the variables, and the other part to define the constructor for the class. In our example, we have only one constructor. However, you can have multiple constructors by altering the parameters based upon your needs. Note that we have created a list which holds Integer,String,Boolean,Account,Contact datatypes together into one single custom data type called 'sampleWrapperClass'. You can then process this List as any other normal list. In our Visualforce page we display the list using a pageBlockTable.

Practical Examples: 

I took down some notes while preparing for the DEV 501 objective exam (first level). Though it might not be that the questions are based out of this notes, i am sure that you will find these useful.

Comparison (triple =)

x === y, check reference. Check's whether the reference between the objects x and y is the same.

Collections in apex:

list - ordered, non unique
set - unordered, unique
map - unordered, key value pair

Check this link for a detailed description. - Click here

Variable types:

static - lifetime is throughout the entire execution context

final - value can be set only once (public static final Integer example = 1)

Query clauses:

ALL ROWS - returns all rows including those in the recycle bin and archived activities
(Ex: System.assertEquals(2, [SELECT COUNT() FROM Contact WHERE AccountId = a.Id ALL ROWS]);)

FOR UPDATE: locks the record for update from other means while the execution is happening.
(Ex:  Account [] accts = [SELECT Id FROM Account LIMIT 2 FOR UPDATE]; )

 Salesforce Query Language:

SOQL - returns a list of sObjects.
SOSL - returns a list of list of sObjects. This is because SOSL queries can query multiple objects.

DYNAMIC BINDING:
Treats the characters after ':' as executable Apex Code.

EXTERNAL ID: NOT unique by default

Webservice methods cannot be overloaded.

Case, switch statements not available in apex as of now. Use nested, IF- ELSE to accomplish this.

Three types of FOR loops:

1) for (integer i=0; i<100 i="" p="">
2) for (Integer i : List)

3) for (Account a: [Select Id from Account where Name != 'Edwin'])
    for (List accts : [SELECT id, name FROM account
                                                                               WHERE name LIKE 'Acme']) - Querymore mode


Apex Manual Sharing:
Row Cause: Can create custom row cause from the 'Apex Sharing Reasons' related list on the custom object. Ex: Schema.Object__Share.RowCause.Rowcausename__c

Access: Read, Edit, Full (this is only for owner and cannot be set for other users)

Field: IsDeleted = TRUE, indicates records in the recycle bin

Different database operations:
INSERT UPSERT UPDATE DELETE MERGE UNDELETE

database.dmloptions - Ex: truncation (text fields exceeding max limit- truncate or throw error)

database.setsavepoint()
datase.rollback(savepointname)

You can have a maximum of upto 5 savepoints.
No explicit COMMIT statement, commit happens implicitly at the end of the transaction.

Different types of trigger events:

before insert
before update
after insert
after update
before delete
after delete
after undelete

if you have 4 different triggers on say the 'before insert' event, there is no guarantee on the execution order of the triggers

Merge event - delete on losing record, update on winning record


Cascade DELETE - if a master record is deleted the trigger fires on the master record, however even though the detail records are deleted the trigger does not fire on the detail records.

String comparison in apex: uppercase A is different from lowercase a

Exception Handling:

try {throw} catch (){} finally{}

public class MyException extends Exception{}

//try, throw and catch
     try {
         Integer i;
         //Your code here
         if ( i < 5 ) throw new MyException();
    } catch ( MyException e ) {
         //Your MyException handling code here
    }
    finally { system.debug('executes no matter what');}

############### Apex Code Developer's Guide##########################
Custom Labels: Accessed using the notation System.Label.Label_Name

If You have Person Accounts enabled and you insert an Account using (name='xxx') a Business Account is created. If you insert a account using (Lastname ='yyy') a person account is created.

Relationship tip:
When being read as a value, if c.Account is null, then c.Account.Name evaluates to null,but does not yield a NullPointerException.
When being modified, if c.Account is null, modifying c.Account.Name does yield a NULL pointer exception.

A LIST can contain unto four levels of nested lists.

Use the Comparable interface to implement a custom sort for Lists.