Salesforce, Bugs & You

Bugs. Bleh. As far as I know Salesforce doesn’t maintain a list of ‘Known Issues’ and sadly this can mean hours poring over code, trying to find where you went wrong, and eventually finding that it wasn’t your code at all. Of course it wasn’t, because you are perfect. Go on give yourself a hug.

To this end I’ll post bugs as I find them and if you feel like contributing, mail me a few of your own. Some buggy areas are quite obscure, so I’ll start with a common one, the infamous ‘Null Param passed by a CommandButton’. Dun dun duh.

This bug is a tricky one, especially when you’ve just started working with Salesforce. There are so many things that you could’ve done wrong passing data from one page to another, so you examine each tiny area until you run out of patience and hit the discussion boards. Gotta love the boards.

A description of this bug would be something along the lines of:

I’m passing a value to a page using a param of a commandButton but the value is null on the receiving end. I’ve checked the debug logs and the value is not null at the time the button is pushed, please help!!!

If you’d like to recreate this bug your code would look something like this:

[code language=”xml”]
<apex:commandButton action="{!myAction}" value="SendANullParam">

<apex:param name="nullParm" value="{!myValue}"/>

</apex:commandButton>
[/code]

There are various workarounds for this, mostly depending on your situation, but the quickfix is simply to swap the commandButton for a commandLink and use the salesforce standard styleClass=”btn”.

[code language=”xml”]
<apex:commandLink action="{!myAction}" value="SendANullParam" styleClass="btn" style="color:white;text-decoration:none">

<apex:param name="nullParm" value="{!myValue}"/>

</apex:commandLink>
[/code]

Note that you’ll still have to do a bit of styling, but this will get you pretty close to where you need to be. Take that bugs, pew pew.