Geckoboard – Salesforce Integration

Geckoboard has an online development environment, Widget Editor that can be used for integration. Custom Widgets API is used to create custom charts and widgets for dashboards, visualizing the data on Geckoboard.

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Whats new in Chatter in Salesforce ’12 release

Since past few releases, Chatter has been one of the main thrust areas of Salesforce. The Spring ‘12 release continues that tradition. This article summarizes the main Chatter features in Spring ‘12 release.

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ERD at your doorstep – Schema Builder

Salesforce had introduced a Beta version of Schema Builder in Winter 2012. Although the feature remains in Beta, a few important features have now been added to Schema Builder. In Spring 2012 release Salesforce has introduced ability to create new objects and fields directly from Schema Builder, besides improving the user interface of the tool.

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Starting with Spring 12 Apex test cases will not have access to org data

A good practice that Salesforce recommends is that Apex test cases create their own test data. They should not assume that certain data is present in the Salesforce instance. However this was not enforced. As an example a developer could...

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System Overview – Quick glance of your Salesforce resource usage

In Spring 2012 release, Salesforce has introduced a new feature called System Overview. The primary function of this feature is to display your current Salesforce usage. Out of the maximum permissible resources that you are allowed to use, how much are you currently using? This is what System Overview displays.

The System Overview is available in your Setup area on the left hand top, just below Force.com Home. The information displayed in System Overview is shown in the following sections –

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Displaying the Week from a date using formulae

A common requirement when working with dates is to display the week number for the date. The formula below provided at Salesforce discussion forum works beautifully.

MOD(FLOOR( (Date__c -DATEVALUE(“2006-01-01″ ))/7),52)+1

Let us take couple of examples to illustrate how this works.

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Creating Hyperlinks in Visualforce

Visualforce provides a simple tag to create hyperlinks. This tag is called commandLink. The main advantage of using commandLink tag over the standard HTML <A href> is that commandLink allows us to use Apex methods and variables.

commandLink takes two attributes.

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Dynamic Queries

In a recent project, I had a requirement to run SOQL queries with dynamic object and field names. At the development time, the object name to be queried, field names to be displayed, and the even the number of fields to be queried was also not known. These were coming at runtime. My first attempt was creating a SOQL query something like

select :fieldname1,: fieldName2, :fieldName3 from :objectName

where objectName, fieldName1 etc were String  variables.

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