New Developer Library Released
· Leave a CommentFiled under: Apex, Development, Force.com Platform, New Features, salesforce.com, Visualforce, Winter 10
Today, Developer Force (http://developer.force.com) released its new library. Here are a few of them. All can be found at http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Documentation.
Workbook
http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/workbook/index.htm
Fundamentals
http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/fundamentals/index.htm
Cookbook
http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/cookbook/index.htm
Apex Advanced Code Example
http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/apexcode/Content/apex_shopping_cart_example.htm
https://sites.secure.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000001saDCEAY
And many more to come!
Proof that salesforce.com listens – and comprehends
About two weeks ago, I posted a list of the many setup steps I took to make my Winter ’10 prerelease org useable. Those are the same steps I have to take whenever setting up any Developer Edition org for the first time as well.
An insider at salesforce.com forwarded me this email that a senior person sent to quite a few also-senior people on various product teams:
- Subject:
- Preparing a New Org. Each Pre-Release. In 27 steps.
- Body:
- Yikes. http://www.x2od.com/2009/09/16/preparing-a-new-org.html
This is not the most widely-read blog about Salesforce, but it feels good to know that salesforce.com does have its ear to the ground and is taking seriously even the indirect feedback that we bloggers provide.
Kudos, salesforce.com.
PS. While I’m at it, I may as well also mention that too many fields are invisible to every profile. Example on Account: Site, Ownership, SIC Code, and more. And Annual Revenue is invisible to Customer Portal users. It would be great to have a guide or documentation.
PPS. Turns out that there’s no rhyme nor reason why some orgs have various fields invisible. Between demo, developer, trial, prerelease, and more, some fields are available and some are not. It is a huge waste of time to find all the fields and enable them.
Dashboards are Improved AND New in Summer 09
· 2 CommentsFiled under: Configuration, Native Application, New Features, salesforce.com, Summer 09
The Summer09 prerelease orgs are here, so get yours now! Upon first look, something cool stood out and merits immediate posting:
Dashboards are improved. The colors are more vivid, there’s detail in the bars and pie chart wedges, and… pie charts can now display the actual and percentage values!
Dashboards are also new. Visualforce pages can now be included as dashboard components, and there’s a new “Color-Blind Palette on Charts” setting for each user. Here are before and after shots.
Salesforce dashboard with regular color scheme
Salesforce dashboard with color-blind/alternate color scheme
The Ultimate Visualforce Events Tab – Almost
· 5 CommentsFiled under: Configuration, salesforce.com, Visualforce, Winter 09
This bears emphasizing: Enhanced Lists were initially not fully released for Activity/Event/Task objects, but are available now.
The code is ridiculously simple, thanks to the apex:EnhancedList Visualforce tag:
<apex:page standardController="Task" > <apex:enhancedlist type="Activity" height="800" rowsPerPage="50" /> </apex:page>See? Nothing to it! Or so we thought. There are some catches (there always are):
- The original use-case required displaying all upcoming events without the header or sidebar. We still cannot do this. Quoting from the Winter ’09 Release Notes: The enhancedList component is not allowed on pages that have the attribute showHeader set to false.
- We’d like to create a custom tab for this page. We create a Visualforce Tab, pick a custom icon, and show the page… and when I click on the tab, the enhanced list is displayed, but the tab is not highlighted. Also, the custom icon I chose is not displayed. How do we highlight our tab?
After making the page, we make the tab as desribed above. Then we RETURN to the page and add a tabstyle modifier to the apex:page tag, like so:<apex:page standardController="Task" tabstyle="enhanced_activities__tab"> <apex:enhancedlist type="Activity" height="800" rowsPerPage="50" /> </apex:page>
[Of course, change the tab name to whatever you choose.]Success? Not quite. There’s another catch:
- The tab is highlighted (brown in our case), but the color and icon for the enhanced list are standard green/home.
Sadly, I have no workaround for this one. Sorry.
Moving forward, consider if you want to create a particular enhanced list view instead of calling the standard enhanced Activity list as I have done here. If you would prefer to make a custom enhanced list view, then you will need to add more code, but that is beyond the scope of this post.
Enjoy!
