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.

To see their blog post, follow this link:

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

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:

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.

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

How cool is that?

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:

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:

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.

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.

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!

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.

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