Posts Tagged ‘Apex’
Salesforce: Enhanced Custom Settings
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 »
Salesforce: System.Assert vs System.AssertEquals
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)
Salesforce: Using basic email templates from Apex code
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.
Salesforce API Integration Using SOAP-based Web Services
Too Much Documentation (TMD) - The leading cause of baldness amongst men.
There are several tomes & tools to help you integrate with the platform; this article will concentrate on WSDL defined web services. Some help texts are specific to certain languages, others favour certain approaches but I’ve found there’s no short-and-sweet guide. As someone who’s nearly drowned in the documentation (including forums, tweets and blogs) I thought I’d try to save – at least some of you – the white-squall that is ‘Learning the basics of SFDC WSDL-based integration’.
I’ll be the first to admit that summarising such a broad topic can be difficult, so if I do miss anything out, y’all out there in the community just let me know. Read the rest of this entry »
Salesforce Unit Tests & Code Coverage
Unit testing *sigh*. Oh how they vex me. If they weren’t so important (and required) I’d just skip the lot, but they are and so we – champions of software development – must press on in the face of dreary complexity; we will not back down, we will not surrender, we will look that CRT/LCD screen in the pixels and say, “Untested units, you will not defeat me!”.
Diving into the thick of things, the most common question seems to be, “Why can’t I get code coverage for my entire class?!”. The trick here is to think like a runtime engine, and consider how you might journey through all possible testing paths. Now I never said it’s easy, but with a bit of practice (and 8 truck loads of patience) you’ll get there. Let’s look at some common cases. Read the rest of this entry »
Salesforce: Polymorphism driven by Apex class inheritance
Polywhatsthatnow? Polymorphism ” is the ability of one type, A, to appear as and be used like another type, B.”
It is a facet of OOP and can best be described using the good ol’ example of the ‘Shape’ class problem (thanks Java!). Let’s suppose we’d like to create an application that drew a number of shapes on a page. At the time of analysis we know that we want to immediately support circles, but to future-proof our application we need to support the drawing of any shapes. Being Pretty Darn Good Developers(tm) we realise we should create a Shape class that has a single method used to draw itself, and any specific shapes should be derived from this class, and override that method. Make sense? Didn’t think so. Read the rest of this entry »
Howto: Communicate between template- and inner- pages.
This post is as much about me asking a question as it is about providing a solution, so don’t let me down community. I got your back, but you’ve got to scratch mine too.. A little to the left, ah yeah, that’s it. The topics in question here are page templates, their controllers, and the pages (and the controllers) that use the template. But first let’s start with what I’ve discovered.
I like using page templates, they make my life easier. If I’m creating a site I probably want to have some consistency of navigation, page header, search etc. across all my web pages. So let’s assume I have the following setup:
1. A VisualForce page I use as a template.
2. A controller for this page that handles navigation, searching etc.
3. Several ‘inner’ VisualForce pages that use this template.
4. A controller for each of these pages. Read the rest of this entry »
DML currently not allowed
This almost belongs in my sarcastically titled, “Meaningful Error Messages ..” series, but as it has traceable causes, I thought I’d write something up on it’s most frequent causes (I meant to write this up a few months ago, but it slipped my mind (find it in your heart to forgive an ol’ developer) and now I think it’s time the world knew).
‘DML currently not allowed’, what could that mean? Well it means that DML isn’t allowed. And that it’s not allowed right now, but with the slight promise that given time, it will be allowed. Often in the past, hoping against hope, I kept on pressing that button/link/onclick-area, but the cloud never changed it’s mind. With a sigh I constructed the google-search query and began trundling through the results. Read the rest of this entry »
Flickr + jQuery + Salesforce = Awesome^5 [Part 2]
Okay software developing enthusiasts, I’m back from Paris (you didn’t know I was gone did ya?), I’m a year older and culturally, I’m richer (well I’d like to think so at least). It’s time to complete our two-part series on integrating disparate systems using the most-excellent combination of web services, jQuery and the Force.com platform. In part 1 we learnt how to connect to a third-party endpoint (Flickr in our case), and consume their SOAP-based web services. Now we’re going to jazz it all up with our spiffy jQuery gallery carousel. Let’s have another look at where we want to be at the end of this all,
Flickr + jQuery + Salesforce = Awesome^5 [Part 1]
Being a mathematician, equations like those in the title usually make me wanna poke someone in the eye.. but in this case it’s just too true to not use. My aim over the next two posts is to provide you with the knowledge to,
- Consume web services from within the Force.com platform(without WSDLs).
- Use web services(we’ll be using the SOAP-based variety), or other agents, as data sources for integration with JavaScript, and in particular, jQuery.
I will cover point 1 in this post, and then bring it all together in a second post which will cover point 2. It’s gonna be a rocky ride, but I’m sure all you cowboys/girls/others can handle it. Just so we know where we want to end up, our final product will look something like this,
The Silver Lining 