The Silver Lining

Lessons & Learnings from a salesforce certified technical architect.

Archive for the ‘SOSL’ Category

Announcing the Salesforce Handbook

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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.

SOSL, friend or foe?

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As requested by Chris Peterson I’d like to dig a bit more into SOSL. This is as much a lesson for me as anyone else, and I’d be ecstatic if anyone out there could offer a bit more depth on the topic. SOSL (or sossel) is Salesforce’s search language, and in my experiences definitely has it’s advantages(which are significant in the CRM) and limitations(which may stem from me/us just not knowing how to use it properly). First let’s make sure you have the standard docs memorised.

Basic doc on SOSL within Apex code

API doc, thorough on syntax although might not have some common examples.

Doc for dynamic SOSL

Right, now that we have those committed to memory we can delve into what I think are the advantages and disadvantages of SOSL.. Read the rest of this entry »

Written by Wes

October 10, 2009 at 5:08 pm