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..

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OOP in the Salesforce Cloud – ReCaptcha Revisited

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Can I get a OOP OOP?! That’s right folks, OOP is alive and well on the Force.com platform, and over the past few months I’ve had some pretty thrilling experiences implementing projects using those trusted sidekicks Encapsulation, Polymorphism and trusty ol’ Abstraction. There is some pretty sweet documentation on the subject, but I thought I’d demo something supercool I learnt by combining two articles from the Force.com wiki.

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Passing Javascript values to Apex code.

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It’s been a while crocodile. Truth be told I was working furiously on my Site’s Developer Challenge entry, and then I was just too pooped to post. I’m sure you were all waiting with bated breath for my next post.. nooooot.

Anyway, let’s get down to brass tacks. Quite often I’ve needed to manipulate variable values in-page(Visualforce) with JS, and then pass these modified values to Apex or a Standard Controller. Just as often I’ve simply dismissed the possibility and worked-around the issue. Recently I was speaking to a fellow who proposed the beginnings of a terribly smashing idea and thought I’d try my hand at a simple implementation.

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Lists of SObjects and Classes – By value or reference?

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I found a quirky bug in my code some time back, and realised that the cause of the bug was quite a useful Apex feature viz. SObjects and Apex classes are passed by reference and not value.

What does this mean you say? Let’s start by defining what passing by value means.

In a nutshell, if you pass a variable to a method and it’s a Force.com primitive type(Integer, String etc.) it will be passed by value meaning that the value of the variable and not the variable itself is passed to the method

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Formatting Salesforce OutputText

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Quite recently I came across an interesting forum post by XactiumBen that mentioned some awesomesauce abilities of params in outputTexts. I’ve written an article detailing the basics of this functionality before, and thought I’d document these advanced capabilities too. For anyone interested you can read Part 1 here.

Now I’m sure some of you thought that simply being able to use dynamic custom labels was pretty smashing in it’s own right, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. Imagine a world where you could not only use dynamic custom labels, but were also able to use decision structures in those labels. That’s the world we live in buddy!

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Meaningful Error Messages #94

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This one is a hoot, Error: java.sql.SQLException: ORA-00001: unique constraint (CORE.AKAPEX_CLASS) violated ORA-06512: at “SNEEZY.CAPEX”, line 505 ORA-06512: at line 1 : {call cApex.update_class(?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?)})} Sneezy.Capex, what a cute name. The number of question marks in the error message scares me a bit so I may take an early lunch and try to forget about it. Solution pending.

Meaningful Error Messages #24

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Having just managed to discover the cause of a particular error message, I thought I’d share the solution with the community.

Once in while you come across error messages that point you in absolutely no direction at all. Most recently I’ve been receiving ‘Failed validation: ApexPage‘. Thinking that I might get something more meaningful from the in-browser IDE I dumped my code there and got this little gem

ErrorError: common.request.servlet.PageDispatcher$Hack404
ErrorError: null
Considering that I was working with a several hundred line file, this made me less than happy. At times like these I whip out that old faithful tool of developer’s everywhere, the binary search algorithm.

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the sharing model cannot be updated through the api

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Now I’m sure there’s a reason for this but it makes me sad a bit. Especially when working with a team of developers. Recently I found myself in the following situation,

My team and I had been building a Force.com application and were interested in implementing an UAC model. We had setup the UAC model on one of the Orgs using profiles, roles and sharing rules(we had some issues here too) and then attempted to commit these changes into our SVN repository. Happy that things were going so well, each developer checked out the code and BHAM! we were no longer able to deploy object definitions. [Slow pan to me on my knees screaming to the heavens. A thunderbolt, then a thunderclap overhead]

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Handling System.QueryException

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When attempting to fetch a single record from the database it is easy to run into the above exception. I’ve seen two schools of thought in dealing with this issue – mostly in the forums – and have been hoping to find a more official standpoint.

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