Salesforce CRM Archives - Page 2 of 7

Next Birthday Formula

July 6, 2011 by David Schach 4 Comments

How would you display your Contacts with upcoming birthdays? I’ve seen people use “Birthdays This Week,” “Birthdays This and Next Week,” and other reports to display the list. I’ve also seen requirements for showing a person’s next birthday, to trigger an automatic email to each Contact on his/her birthday. Let’s see how it’s done: Next, […]

PageReference Best Practice

May 5, 2011 by David Schach 2 Comments

I've seen a lot of coders put the following into their custom Visualforce controllers: I've decided that I don't like this approach. It feels too much like a URL hack, and though I'm sure that it will always work (meaning that salesforce.com will never change its way of referring to a record by /<recordID>), I'd […]

Content Latest Version Flag

May 4, 2011 by David Schach 2 Comments

Yesterday, I used Content Delivery to send a pdf to a client. Simple, right? Upload the Word document to Content, associate it with a record, and deliver the content. Surely if I upload a new version, the delivery will refer to the latest version, right? There’s no place to select that option, so I can […]

PersonAccount Stay-In-Touch Gotcha

March 28, 2011 by David Schach 2 Comments

I make no secret that I’m a fan of PersonAccounts. I think they’re very handy when working with individuals instead of companies, and I really like pairing them with the Relationship Groups app to make households. I’ve always considered them as mostly-contacts. I put all Person fields on the Contact object, reserving very few for […]

Chatter BINGO Released Into The Wild

March 25, 2011 by David Schach Leave a Comment

With Dreamforce 2010 behind us and Dreamforce 2011 fast approaching, the first ever crowdsourced conference application is publicly available! Chatter BINGO has been released as an unmanaged package, meaning that all the source code is open and ready for customizing to your hearts’ content. Chatter BINGO was conceived by Chris Shackelford and Brad Gross (@imperialstout) […]

Activity Type Field – Do Not Use

March 21, 2011 by David Schach Leave a Comment

The field Event.Type (which is sort of the same as Task.Type) is a difficult field to use. Here are a few reasons: Type cannot be the controlling field for a dependent picklist. On an Event list view (/007), even when specifying record type, the Type field cannot be edited. Salesforce requires you to select a […]

Visualforce Inline Editing – I’m In Love

February 28, 2011 by David Schach 4 Comments

I’m totally addicted to the new Visualforce inline editing feature. It all started with this post by Josh Birk at Developerforce. I liked it, but as a “standardstylesheets” specialist, I wanted a bit more. Then I looked at the Visualforce apex:inlineEditSupport documentation, and I was hooked. Okay, so you’re probably wondering why this is so […]

System Replacement For isTest Apex Method

February 23, 2011 by David Schach 1 Comment

Sometimes we have to write code that executes differently if the Apex is being tested. For a great example, check out Scott Hemmeter's blog post on testing webservice callouts at http://sfdc.arrowpointe.com/2009/05/01/testing-http-callouts/. Scott's example works well, and he uses a Boolean isApexTest, running certain code if this is true or false. I used to do something […]

Chatter and the CLM

June 11, 2010 by David Schach 2 Comments

I love Chatter. I love the way that it is a game-changer. I think that Chatter is a powerful tool. But as Peter Parker's Uncle Ben said, "With great power comes great responsibility," and with the possibility of great rewards from Chatter comes great risks. First I'll list my conclusions, just so there's no misunderstanding. […]

Sophisticated DateTime “Formula Fields” with Apex and Field-Level Security

May 17, 2010 by David Schach 3 Comments

What do you do when you want to calculate a formula-like field but a regular formula won't work? Salesforce CRM's formulas handle dates very well. If you want to enter a date value and have formula fields display, for instance, mydate__c + 21 days, that's simple. Just use mydate__c + 21. Side note: If you […]