Wes

Force.com Anonymous Blocks

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Anonymous Blocks. Where have you been all my life? Right under my nose apparently. I am embarrassed to say I’ve only discovered this little jewel of the Force.com platform recently, and although I’ve managed without it, I’m pretty sure that it’ll be a regular feature in my development experience.

What are they you ask? It’s simply the ability to execute a bit of Apex code on the fly. This is awesome^6 at least. Often during the development process you need to clean your data. Either you’ve changed your logic and that data is affecting functionality, or perhaps you need to remove data en masse. This is simple with Anonymous Blocks, just write up a short script that will restore your data to an ‘initial’ state and save it for future use.

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VisualForce Component Ids & Javascript

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I have retired this approach in favour of a much neater solution that can be found here.

Salesforce used in conjunction with JavaScript and Ajax can be pretty smashing. I’ve used a number of JavaScript libraries that make you want to high-five yourself when implemented. There can(and probably will) be some frustration while you bend a library and make it fit within the Salesforce framework, although Ron Hess has some pretty sweet examples for you to pore over.

One simple frustration I’ve come across is that of retrieving elements by Id. Salesforce has an intelligent scheme in place which ensures that HTML elements don’t have duplicate Ids and therefore conform to W3C standards.

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Datatable VS Repeat

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A long long time ago, in an office not far away I pondered the need for so much variety in the VisualForce ‘structural’ component library. I mean, dataTables, pageBlockTables, outputPanels, panelGrids, repeats, panelBars.. jeez Louise. And when would I use them all? How should I combine them? If I type google in google will I break the Internet? Okay, I didn’t really ponder the last one, everyone knows that’s true.

Nowadays I’d like to think I have a feel for what to use, and when. More specifically I’m going to dig into when to use dataTables over repeats, and vice versa(The only real difference I can find between pageBlockTable and dataTable is that dataTable has a cool onhover JS handler that highlights the currently onhovered row, so I’m totally going to ignore pageBlockTable. Speak to the hand pageBlockTable, because the face ain’t listening).

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Salesforce Savepoints

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Transaction control is an important part of any system that interacts with a database and Salesforce has neat ways of implementing said control.

Anyone that’s worked with SQL databases will be familiar with savepoints and rolling back, and Salesforce has implemented similar constructs. For those who haven’t heard of these terms wikipedia describes them as

A savepoint is a way of implementing subtransactions (also known as nested transactions) within a relational database management system by indicating a point within a transaction that can be “rolled back to” without affecting any work done in the transaction before the savepoint was created.

A rollback is an operation which returns the database to some previous state.

As with most things, the importance of these two features is best demonstrated using examples.

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Salesforce, Bugs & You

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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.

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Visualforce & Dynamic CSS

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When I started working on the Force.com platform CSS was an area that made me sad a bit. Deep down. Overriding the Salesforce CSS is a nightmare and I would recommend you don’t begin the dark and daunting journey down that path. Rather start afresh, you’ll thank me later.

That said, dealing with CSS on the platform can still be a timeconsuming task. Especially if you are incorporting images into your pages using CSS. My initial process was something similar to this:

  1. Create a stylesheet and some styles. Hopefully you’ve done a good job because you have no way of quick-previewing the result.
  2. Include said stylesheet and all referenced images in a zip file. Take care to preserve the directory structure so that you can reference all stylesheet and image files correctly.
  3. Upload the zip file as a static resource.
  4. Create references to the stylesheet in appropriate pages.
  5. View page. Realise you need to move one of your outputPanels 3px right. Be sad. Deep down. Goto 1.

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Throwing Custom Apex Exceptions

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Throwing custom exceptions is something that most Java developers expect to be able to do when working with Apex code, and indeed it is possible. It isn’t very well documented, but I managed to stumble across this solution after some experimentation. Usually, I would expect an exception to be thrown using syntax at least similar to: However this syntax will give the follow error: Type cannot be constructed: Exception Instead you have to create a new exception class with extends the Apex Exception class: And then throw that new exception: That’s just the beginning of course, you could create some pretty fancypants error handling in your custom exceptions. The world is your oyster, now all your need is some Tabasco and lime.

Dynamic Custom Labels

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I know what you’re thinking, ‘this is cRAzY talk’. But do not doubt my friend, Salesforce has a very powerful translation framework.

Besides being able to change the language used by the Salesforce standard areas with the flick of a picklist, you can include translatable Custom Labels in most of your custom application. To do this you will need to request that the ‘Translation Workbench’ feature be enable for you Salesforce development environment, after which you will find new areas in your ‘Setup’ menu.

Post enablement you can then create a Custom Labels and include them where necessary within your code. This can be done within a VisualForce page like so

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VisualForce Tag Cloud Component

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Tag clouds are nothing new on the interwebs, but there is some debate as to which sort of implementation is best. In this debate I prefer the simplest solution [insert further debate as to the definition of ‘simplest’ here] which I propose to be a simple unordered HTML list with some CSS styling.

Furthermore, wouldn’t it be great if this solution were dynamic, thus enabling you to create tag clouds specific to a particular application context?. Rhetorical question, of course it would be. To this end I’ve created a component that utilises a controller, mostly dynamic in nature.

To start with, let’s have a look at the component code

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