The Silver Lining

Image via CrunchBase

I’m not going to get into the boilerplate code you’ll need in order to get OAuth up and running as it’s pretty straight forward, but I did run into a peculiar issue which took me some time to narrow down. To reproduce these steps you’ll need to:

1. Correctly setup OAuth between the Force.com Platform and LinkedIn
2. Authorise access to your LinkedIn account
3. Attempt to fetch a resource using an API endpoint such as: http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~/network/updates?scope=self

When attempting to make the call out in step 3 you’ll get a “401 – Unauthorized” error. So to be clear OAuth is working perfectly but a call like this one will still result in the error.

After some troubleshooting I noticed that some API endpoints didn’t result in the error e.g. http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/id=abcdefg/network/updates?scope=self. At this point I realised the issue was probably the tilde (‘~’) character in the URI.

Grasping at straws I manually replaced the tilde with it’s URL friendly equivalent ‘%7E’ and the callout worked perfectly. Now this is strange because I am, in the course of making the callout, URL encoding all parts of the endpoint URL. It seems that for some reason the LinkedIn OAuth services needs to have the tilde encoded twice when signing the request :/

I’m not sure if this concept is obvious when reading my previous post, so I thought I’d run through it with a specific example.

Rule one of packaging - Finish your bolognese first!

Let’s say that you’ve created what can only be described as an exemplary application in the form of a Managed Package. Although your user interface is beyond compare, you’d also like to populate some of your core objects with example data. Some options that immediately spring to mind are:

1. Get the person that installs the package to call you, and you can do it post-installation.
2. Get the person that installs the package to create sample data manually post-installation.
3. Give the user a “Start Here” page with a call-to-action – such as a commandButton – that fetches the data from some API and parses into object data.

Option 3 is pretty excellent, especially now that you can package Remote Site Settings but I think we can do one better. And when I say better I mean simpler and with fewer potential points of failure. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sure a lot of you have this documented somewhere but I’ve recently discovered that it’s quite difficult to find an obvious reference to this knowledge on the interwobbles. So how would you create a Generic SObject at run-time? It’s rather easy thankfully:

String sObjectName = 'MyObject__c';
Schema.SObjectType t = Schema.getGlobalDescribe().get(sObjectName);
SObject s = t.newSObject();

If you require this type of functionality quite often I’d suggest putting it in a utility class.

Okay book’s done, now where were we? Oh yes software development, right? Programming software engineering application development h4x0R-ing. Oh how I’ve missed getting my mitts dirty so without further ado…

Now this one goes right about... here!

Some time back Custom Settings were introduced on the Force.com Platform and we all star-jumped in the air, w00ting to anyone who would listen. Up till this point – if you’re anything like me – you were using custom objects to hold configuration data, whether this be lists of language-codes, or operational settings such at outbound web service endpoints, usernames, passwords etc. With Custom Settings you finally had a place to put this information – a home if you will – for your lonely, orphaned Control Data.

Quite quickly however I realised there was still a gaping hole that could be filled with Custom Settings but just didn’t feel right. Lists of data (such as currency codes and descriptions) fit really well into this structure but more serious Control Data that you only need to be listed once-off (such as important URLs, flags to active/deactive modules in your application, usernames and passwords) just don’t seem like they really belong with this other crowd. A quick list of reasons highlights this:

• Control Data is typically entered once off and creating an entire Custom Setting for a single line of data feels like a waste.
• Custom Settings are data so they can’t be deployed with code, they must be created after the fact. Control Data should be a little more important than regular data, it needs a smarter vehicle than plain-old data entry.
• If you’re creating packages you want as much autonomy for your clients as possible. If you use custom settings there will have to be that “Create data in Custom Setting X__c” step in each and every deployment. Read the rest of this entry »

For a time I’d wondered what the difference between the System.Assert and System.AssertEquals methods might be (System.AssertNotEquals to a lesser degree). To be honest this tip isn’t going to help much with World Peace or Curing Internetlessness, but it’s certainly gonna save you some time.

Looking at the documentation there are some obvious differences.

• System.Assert accepts two parameters, one (mandatory) which is the condition to test for and the other a message (optional) to display should that condition be false.
• System.AssertEquals and System.AssertNotEquals both accepts three parameters; the first two (mandatory) are the variables that will be tested for in/equality and the third (optional) is the message to display if the assert results in false.

Pretty standard stuff, and can all be learnt simply by Reading The Manual.

Now testing best practices state that you should assert some condition but also output a “console” message that shows the values of each of the operands. This certainly helps you debug unit tests when asserts are failing, but man I hate typing extra code just to check out some variable values! So the time saving trick that isn’t obvious is that when omitting the optional third parameter for System.AssertEquals and System.AssertNotEquals the compiler automagically outputs the values of the operands to the console log. That’s right, instead of typing:

System.assert(var1 == var2, "The value of var1 is: " +var1 + " and the value of... oh hell I don't care I mean it's just a variable");

You could type:

System.assertEquals(var1, var2);

If the second assertion fails the console will output the values of var1 and var2 with the labels “expected” and “actual”. Knowing this now I can see no exceptional reason to use System.assert any longer (sorry little guy).

As I said this trick’s not gonna start any Mexican Waves but it should help delay the onset of RSI.

(thanks to l-dawg for opening my eyes)

Recently, Jeff Douglas and I saw the potential for a beginner’s book – aimed at business owners, analysts and developers, that comprehensively documents Salesforce and Force.com. There is a tonne of documentation out there and we thought “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a handbook that lightly summarised the most important areas of the platforms as well as offering some best practise advice”. We mulled it over for a time, and today we’d like to announce that we’re currently writing:

The Salesforce Handbook

A newcomer’s guide to building applications on Salesforce.com and the Force.com Platform.

Hand-in-hand with the book we’ll be publishing content from the book on a WordPress site. Here you can expect to find excerpts from the book, but also content that supplements the book e.g. areas that’ll serve as best-practice hubs with links to official documentation, blog posts that rock the party, and even superb discussion forum threads.

We’d love to get your feedback on the book as it progresses, but for now you can checkout the announcement and let us know what you think of the idea.

A few weeks ago I noticed a number of questions in the forums around how to use email templates from Apex classes. I Googled a few keywords and come up with very little. I then trawled the documentation but came up empty-handed. Eventually it was Eclipse that provided the knowledge required, and I thought I’d share it with the good ol’ developer community.

One part of the process is discovering that Salesforce stores all sorts of items as records in objects; some of them being email templates, user information and even Apex class bodies (scandalous). All you have to do is query them. The other major part is finding that the method you need is missing from the Apex documentation.

Read the rest of this entry »

Salesforce could be regarded as the cloud computing leader but history tells us that many-a-giant has fallen before. Apple has; Microsoft has; IBM has. I think Salesforce is still on the up ‘n up, but there are contenders out there and some of them are noteworthy; probably the most obvious of these is Google. Over the past few months I’ve dug into the Google cloud platform and I thought it was time to attempt a side-by-side comparison of my two favourite PaaS providers.

The bigger they are ...

Some quick definitions are probably in order:

Force.com is a cloud computing platform as a service offering from Salesforce, the first of its kind allowing developers to build multi tenant applications that are hosted on their servers as a service.

Google App Engine is a platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source set of tools that allows web developers to create and maintain complex JavaScript front-end applications in Java. Read the rest of this entry »

Pajinated DataTable

Pagination is an essential, and not so easy to implement user interface device that allows the developer to break long lists of items, or one very long item into sub-pages. I love the challenge that pagination brings (who doesn’t really) when developing efficient and reusable server-side code, but this article isn’t about that. Sometimes I need things done quickly, easily, and preferably with as little compromise as possible, and that’s what client-side pagination is all about. Read the rest of this entry »

In an attempt to attend DreamForce this year – I will conquer the Atlantic! – I’ve written up a white paper on a set of tools and workflows that I’ve found superb in more ways than one. I’d be happy & ecstatic(hapstatic?) if you could take a gander at my paper and, if it tickles your fancy, give it your vote. The idea itself describes the paper, but I failed to proof read it (and shock! Horror! There is no edit capability) so I’ll post a more refined version here,

Rapid application development is one of the strongest selling points of Salesforce and Force.com Platform; one that I’ve personally experienced time and time again. However, when it comes to translating that beautiful design document into a VisualForce interface, going from the design bits

The design document built from the 960.gs template

to a cross-browser, standards-compliant site prototype can be troublesome and often takes several days… and let’s be honest, potentially weeks. Read the rest of this entry »