Salesforce NHUG Newsletter

Hello New Hampshire User Group Members, Dreamforce I made it back from Dreamforce @ San Francisco safely.  It was a lot of fun and very educational, too.  If you weren’t able to make it, you can still experience some of the event online.  You can see the Keynote speeches by going here or here. The big announcement of the week was the new Salesforce Collaboration Cloud called Chatter.  This cloud will allow you to have a facebook/twitter – like collaboration within your organization.  You can follow objects or people in your org, allowing you to see any events that affect those people or objects.  During the Opening Keynote, Salesforce Co-founder Parker Harris said to Marc Benioff: “Your apps are talking”.  Visit the Chatter Web Page to view a demo of this new Cloud. If you attended Dreamforce and would like to download content, you can do so at the Attendee Portal by clicking the Content link on the left. Even if you didn’t attend Dreamforce, you can view Breakout Sessions on You Tube. New Salesforce Materials Salesforce has released 3 documents in the past week.  These documents are: -  The new release of the Force.com Cookbook - Force.com Fundamentals, An Introcution to custom application development in the cloud - The Force.com Workbook, quick 30 minute tutorials to build your first app in the cloud Odds and Ends Check out the latest User Experience Blog entry, which talks about the new Graphical Approval Process Editor. If you’re running a Non-Profit on Salesforce?  You might be interested in Model Metrics’ free application for Donation Management. Here’s a nice little blog entry which provides a piece of trigger code that counts how many times an Opportunity date has been pushed out. Doing some Web Development?  Here are 34 Cheat Sheets that you might find helpful. The next NHUG Meeting? JP and I have yet to pick a date for our next meeting, or to put together a list of presenters.  If you are interested in presenting or know of a product or feature that you’d like to see presented, then please let us know.  As soon as we know more about the next meeting, we’ll let you know. Take care, Paul Overy NHUG Co-Leader

New Releases of Force.com Cookbook and Force.com Fundamentals

Salesforce.com has released new versions of both the Force.com Cookbook and Force.com Fundamentals.  Blog entries can be found on the Salesforce Community site at the links, below.

Force.com Cookbook Blog Entry

Force.com Fundamentals Blog Entry

You can download a .pdf version of these documents if you have a developer account.  Developer accounts are available for free by clicking the “Join Now” link at the top of either of the blog pages listed.

Watch Force.com Developer Courses on iTunes!

Great news!  Salesforce.com has made their developer courses available on iTunes!

To see their blog post, follow this link:

http://blog.sforce.com/sforce/2009/08/watch-forcecom-developer-courses-on-itunes.html

Formatting Time in APEX

Every time I need to display the date and time someplace, I have to go digging through old code to find examples of how I’ve formatted  it in the past.  When I encountered this problem today,  I decided to post a blog on it.  In the future I’ll be able to come here to see how to do it, and hopefully others will benefit from it, as well:

So here’s the goal of this blog:  I simply want to create a string that displays the current time & date in some readable format, such as: Aug 26, 2009 02:45 AM.  This is actually quite easy to do, once you know how to retrieve the time and what the formatting characters are to display it properly.

Getting the current time is easy since there is a simple function that returns the current time into a DateTime variable:  datetime.now()

So that leaves formatting the result, which is the part that is difficult to memorize if you don’t use it frequently.  Formatting requires that you provide a character sequence that defines what the string-formatted version of the date/time will look like.  For example, to format a string to look like this: 08-26-09 02:45 AM, you would use a format string that looks like this: MM-dd-yy hh:mm a

Here’s a table of format characters and what piece of the Date/Time object they display:

Letter	Date or Time Piece	Examples
G	Era	G = AD
y	Year	yy = 09, yyyy = 2009
M	Month	MM = 08, MMM = Aug, MMMMM = August
w	Week in year	w = 35
W	Week in month	W = 3
D	Day in year	D = 235
d	Day in month	dd = 27
F	Day of week in month	F = 2
E	Day in week	E = Thu, EEEEE = Thursday
a	AM/PM	a = AM or PM
H	Hour in day (0-23)	HH = 23
k	Hour in day (1-24)	kk = 24
K	Hour in am/pm (0-11)	KK=11
h	Hour in am/pm (1-12)	hh = 12
m	Minutes in hour	mm = 30
s	Second in minute	ss = 55
S	Millisecond in second	SSS = 888
z	Time zone	z = EDT, zzzzz = Eastern Daylight Time
Z	Time zone offset	Z = -0400

So all that leaves to show is an example:

DateTime d = datetime.now();
timeStr = d.format(‘MMMMM dd, yyyy hh:mm:ss a’);

Which results in a value being assigned to timeStr that looks something like this: August 27, 2009 03:15:49 PM

Keep in mind that this doesn’t have to be used for the current time.  You can use this method to format any DateTime object, no matter where you retrieved it from.  For example, you could get the CreatedDate for any object and then use the format command to display it in a Visualforce page.

Good luck..  I hope you find this useful.

Ribbit for Salesforce

Source: Article from vnunet.com

BT has unveiled Ribbit for Salesforce, a hosted telephony service designed to help reduce the latency of information travelling from field workers into the business.

The application enables all Salesforce CRM customers to link mobile voice communications with their existing accounts. Voice-to-text conversion allows field service agents, or any other user, to dictate notes and memos verbally on their mobile phones, which are converted into text and added into Salesforce CRM and the user’s email inbox.

An application that lets you add data to Salesforce, simply by talking into your cell phone.

How cool is that?

Salesforce Offers free Mobile Application

Starting today, Salesforce.com will be offering a slimmed-down version of its customer management tools for high-end cell phones.

In order to use this, your Salesforce Organization needs to enable Mobile Lite.  Contact your administrator to make sure this has been done before you try using this application.

I’ve installed this application on my iTouch.  At the top level of the application are the following options:

Accounts

Cases

Contacts

Solutions

Leads

Opportunities

Dashboards

Training

App Info

There doesn’t seem to be any way to access custom objects, although custom fields are shown in the objects that are available.

At the bottom of the screen are the following options:

Recents	shows the objects that you’ve viewed recently
Search	Pick an object to search.  Objects are:  Tasks, Event, Accounts, Cases, Contacts, Solutions, Leads, and Opportunities
Tasks	View/Create Tasks
Events	View/Create Events

Sales Representatives would probably find this handy to have with them in the field.  You can use it to access your data, as well as to update basic objects and activities, but it doesn’t seem like it will be much use for managing Salesforce remotely.

Open Cloud Manifesto

IBM has initiated a new “Open Cloud Manifesto”, which can be found here.

Notably missing from the list of supporters are some of the largest Cloud Computing organizations: Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.

The document is a quick read (only 7 pages), which defines Cloud Computing, identifies Challenges and Goals, and lists a set of Principals that supporting organizations should adopt.

The document feels a little heavy-handed to me.  It seems like the Cloud Computing wannabes are trying to tell the major players that they should work together to create open standards that would make data between cloud vendors more portable, monitoring more standardized and to provide interoperability for them all.  I can see why the new-comers to the Cloud would want this, but the current leaders may not want to invest the time and effort into such a project, which may give a leg-up to their competition.

The document does conclude that “This document is meant to begin the conversation, not define it”.  Hopefully the major players will stay involved in the development of an Open Standard for Cloud Computing, since the end-users will be  real benefactors of such an endevour.

Installing Force.com IDE

My hard drive died on Friday, so I’ve been re-installing applications today.  I decided to document the steps that I took to install the Salesforce IDE (Eclipse) since I had a hard time figuring out what to install both the first time, and once again today.

So here we go:

First of all, Salesforce has a help page for this, but it lists specific versions of Eclipse and the JRE virtual machine.  I wanted a more generic set of instructions that would be useful (hopefully) a year from now.  The Salesforce help page for installing the Eclipse IDE can be found here.

My laptop is running Windows XP, so I may be unaware of any nuances to do with other Operating Systems.  Feel free to comment if you find anything.

The Eclipse IDE requires a Virtual Machine to run.  When I visited the eclipse.org site, they directed me to an IBM page for a virtual machine, but I couldn’t find any download links.  Instead I used Sun’s virtual machine, which you can find here.  I downloaded and installed JRE 6, Update 13.

The latest Eclipse downloads can be found at http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/.  On this page, download “Eclipse IDE for Java Developers”.  I didn’t see any indication of what the latest release was, but the file name was eclipse-java-ganymede-SR2-win32.zip.  After downloading, I was able to find a version in the eclipse/readme/readme_eclipse.html file.  This release was 3.4.2 with a last revised date of Jan 22, 2009.

Extract the folder onto your system someplace.  There really isn’t an ‘install’.  You simply copy the eclipse folder to where ever you want eclipse to live.  I put mine under “C:\”, but “C:\Program Files” wouldn’t have been a bad choice either.

Now that the Eclipse IDE is “installed”, navigate to the eclipse folder and run eclipse.exe.  Now you’re ready to install the Salesforce specific package…

Eclipse allows you to support various environment types.  Salesforce took advantage of this by creating a version for their development environment.  To download and install it, follow these steps:

1. Click Help->Software updates then click the “Available Software” tab.
2. Click “Add Site“.  Set the URL to “http://www.adnsandbox.com/tools/ide/install/”.  Click OK.  This will add the provided URL to the list of sites.
3. Click the + to the left of the site that you just added(http://www.adnsandbox.com/tools/ide/install/).  You should see Force.com IDE listed.  Select the checkbox next to Force.com IDE.
4. Click the + to the left of Web Tools (WTP) Update Site,  then click the + to the left of Web Tools Platform (WTP) 3.0.4 and Select the checkbox next to “Web Developer Tools” (Note: The Salesforce instructions are to install the Web Standard Toos (WST) Project, but this would not work for this version of Eclipse.  I found Web Developer Tools through some trial and error)
5. Click Install.  This will download and install the specified software.

When the download/installation is done, it will ask you to restart Eclipse.  Click Ok to do so.

Now go to Windows->Open Perspective->Other and you should see Force.com listed.  Select it and click OK.

You should be all set!
Click File->New->Force.com Project, then enter the requested information and you’ll be ready to start coding!

Response from Salesforce Support:

From Salesforce Support:

Dear Paul,

Thank you for contacting Salesforce Support.

Unfortunately because of the workflow rule, some times when a case is edited it mostly through the inline editing options sometimes gets caught saving the information through the API causing the record to hang. The current workaround would be to refresh the page or to Edit via the Edit button on the case.

This has been the case for every Organization across the board for sometime including ours as well. Currently there is not a time frame available of a possible resolution for this issue.

I do apologize for the inconvenience. If you have any further questions please email me and I will be happy to call you back at your convenience. If you are experiencing this issue constantly or daily please let me know.

Thank You for using Salesforce Support and Have a Great Day!

Best Regards,

I’m able to reproduce this problem 100% of the time. Iv’e come up with two workarounds for my guys to use:
1. Hit refresh before using the inline editor.
2. Use the Edit button rather than the inline editor.

Hopefully Salesforce.com will fix this issue soon.

SObject type does not allow triggers: CaseComment

I can’t create a workaround using triggers, since you can’t make a trigger for the CaseComment object.

I’ve submitted a bug to Salesforce, but I’m still trying to come up with something else.