JavaScript

Developing Chrome Extensions for Salesforce

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Chrome extensions are awesome, they provide amazing convenience that is limited only by your imagination. There are some amazing Chrome Extensions for Salesforce already, some of my favourites being: As a great fan of JavaScript I’ve always wanted to create a Chrome Extension for Salesforce and I’ve finally gotten around to it. The hardest part was figuring out what context the JS executes in (e.g. in the current tabs context, or in some separate context). Let me step through the code to show you how it’s done. Chrome Extension Structure A Chrome Extension is made up of a JavaScript, HTML, images and JSON. At its core is a manifest file which contains the metadata describing your application in JSON. There is a lot of documentation about the structure of this file but some of the key elements are shown below. This file references all external resources (JavaScript, images etc.), the …

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Salesforce: JavaScript Remoting – a different way of thinking

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  JavaScript Remoting for Apex operates in a very different paradigm from what you might be used to i.e. Visualforce pages have controllers and the two interact through action methods – where this might be a full form submission or some neat AJAX functionality. Remoting also calls controller methods but there is a gaping maw in terms of how the two work under the hood. I’ve seen a few great articles on the syntax and example usage of JavaScript Remoting for Apex but when I started using it I came across a number domain differences that weren’t documented anywhere. Hopefully my list here will help you in the learning process. The best way to describe the new way of thinking is to examine the features set in contrast to “normal” Apex and Visualforce. How JavaScript Remoting Differs Pass parameters naturally i.e. the call matches the method signature syntactically instead of …

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Salesforce: A better way to work with jQuery selectors and Visualforce Component Ids

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I get very sad when discussing this particular topic. There are a variety of ways of get Visualforce component Ids and using them in JavaScript but all of them keep me awake at night. Srsly. A commenter on one of my posts got me thinking about how we can do this better and I’ve come up with a way that I think is great. Hopefully you’ll agree. This post means that my older posts here and here are now retired in favour of this method. If the world was on the brink of nuclear war with no clear path to peace what could you count on to save the day? Regular Expressions of course. If a meteor the size of Pluto was about to crash into Earth and Bruce Willis was too old to land on it and blow it up what could we count on to rid us of …

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Salesforce: Debugging JavaScript

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I love JavaScript, and working within the Force.com Platform I’m always finding new ways that it can be applied to business needs. I know this is the case for many developers out there but I’ve seen that their typical development process is: Develop the JS code Create bug Include calls to the alert() method to troubleshoot Iterate alert() is bad for debugging I’m sure this process sounds familiar to many of you, but do you know what, the alert() method is a very weak way of troubleshooting. I abandoned it years back because of poor features such as outputting object representations as ‘[object]’ or ‘[undefined]’ – which doesn’t give you a lot to go on. Meet console.log() Modern browsers have access to a library called ‘console‘ which offers a far richer experience, and without the annoying pop-ups. The console.log() method accepts any JavaScript type as a parameter and will always …

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Salesforce: Force.com Sites and Google Analytics

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This is a cross-post from the Tquila blog. Not having analytics built into your public sites is much like having a Q&A site but not allowing people to answer. In this case some of the questions are: Where did you come from? How long did you stick around for? Where did you hang out on your visit? Now I’m not going to debate which set of analytics is best but I did come across a few quirks when setting Google Analytics (GA) up for wesnolte.com that I suspect are fairly universal. Build a Site This of course is quite a big step and I’m going to assume you’re just about done. To get analytics up and running though you’re going to have to do a few extra bits. Sign up for a GA account, create a Website Profile and you’ll receive an Analytics Code. My code has been blocked out …

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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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