Filtered by Apex Class

37 Results

RecordType Utility Apex Class

I like to group Apex methods by the object to which they apply. I find that this supports troubleshooting of code and ultimately reduces the amount of code in a given Salesforce organization. For example, every Salesforce developer that works in an Enterprise level organization or higher will find that more often than not they need to know the record types for a given object. [...]

Pass Values to New Opportunity Using Apex

Last year I wrote a post describing how to pass values to a new opportunity using the URL. This post is simply an alternative to accomplish the same goal of auto-populating values to a new record except using Visualforce and an Apex Class controller. For the purposes of our demonstration we will make some general assumptions about the values we want to pass to the new record. To keep it simple we plan on populating the Name, Stage and Close Date of the new opportunity. We will also make the logic flexible enough so that if Salesforce happens to pass additional information we will be able to include those key value pairs as well. [...]

Locale Aware DateTime Component

I am working with a client that is deploying some existing Visualforce pages to international Users. The Visualforce includes some Date and DateTime values so I checked them to make sure they would render appropriately for people accessing the logic internationally. It turns out that the original Visualforce code uses the <apex:outputText> tag to drive formatting for much of the Date/DateTime values within the pages. Therefore, I am converting the occurrences of each <apex:outputText> tag to the Visualforce component I built for rendering. [...]

UNABLE_TO_LOCK_ROW Error Message

I was recently developing some Apex logic and encountered the UNABLE_TO_LOCK_ROW error while running my Apex unit tests for the new code. This UNABLE_TO_LOCK_ROW error message can happen when unit tests update the same record(s) at the same time or when unit tests try to create records with duplicate index field values. One way to avoid this UNABLE_TO_LOCK_ROW error is to simply turn off parallel test execution. This can be accomplished via Setup > Develop > Apex Test Execution. [...]

Edit Link Override Visualforce Page

I just built a Visualforce application that people can use to associate a number of "child" records to a single "parent" record. Let's say that the application uses the Account object as the standard controller and then we extend the logic so that we can find, manipulate and link many Contact records. The functionality of the application is not important for this post but how we access the application is important. [...]

Error Handling in Visualforce with <apex:pageMessages>

A big part of building Visualforce pages is making sure that the human has a good experience while interacting with the page(s) you've designed. This means that you need to have a good way of handling errors when and if they occur. In this post I will highlight one of the simplest ways to handle an error by utilizing the apex:pageMessages tag within your Visualforce page. [...]

Apex Trigger Status Made Simple

Have you ever needed to deactivate a trigger for some maintenance activities on records or for a code deployment? At a high level, the act of activating/deactivating a trigger is simple. Go to your Salesforce sandbox, modify the status of the trigger and deploy the code. Depending on your unit test coverage for the trigger you may have to tweak the test class and include that in the deployment. [...]

Update to Partner Contact by Community User

Businesses that utilize Salesforce Communities for partners instead of the standard partner portal may find that partners have the ability to search for and find the Contact record that corresponds to their Community User record. It would be nice if salesforce.com did not allow for this visibility because the Partner User is technically unable to make updates to the Partner Contact record. If they click the "Edit" button for the Contact they will receive the Insufficient Privileges message. [...]

Do not create a new opportunity upon Lead conversion using Apex and Visualforce

My client has a use case where they want to convert a Lead but not create an Opportunity at time of conversion. The standard Lead conversion page is fine with the business owners but they want the "Do not create a new opportunity upon conversion" checkbox selected when the page is accessed by the Users in their org. This will allow Users to create an Opportunity in certain cases but default the option to false otherwise. [...]

Daily Processing For Permission Set Access

I came across a use case earlier this month where a Salesforce business owner needed to be able to role out some functionality in a series of waves. Basically, the business was planning on running a pilot with a subset of users for a period of time and then at some interval they planned on granting access to additional users. The business owners wanted to be able to maintain that access and they wanted to be able to turn it on easily. [...]

Salesforce Communities: Allow Partners to Delete

Salesforce releases Communities, which is a much needed improvement to the stoned-aged partner portal user interface. I took part in the pre-release and found that the new functionality comes with some positives and some negatives. One big negative that I found was the inability for Community Users to delete records. Salesforce.com provided a long list of reasons why partners should not be deleting records and why this basic functionality is not provided. But let's be serious... I am not going to field calls from partners because they need me or another admin in the org to remove records that they no longer need. After a week of taking these requests during the pilot, I decided to make the functionality available to Community Users - just because it would save me and those same partners some frustration. [...]

Wrapper Class Example for Visualforce Page

I must admit that when I first heard about using a wrapper class in a Visualforce page I did not really grasp the concept. Reading the developer docs and reading other blogs didn’t really help either. It was only when I came across a practical use case that the concept really sunk in and I thought I would share that here for any other developers trying to make sense of the idea. [...]

Avoid Heap Size Limits in Visualforce Pages

I built this great Visualforce page where I display and allow for editing of many records at once. The initial business requirement was for only a few hundred records to be used in this application but, as usual, requirements morphed and now the business wants to be able to use this app for thousands of records. So guess what... we now encounter the "System.LimitException: Apex heap size too large" governor limit. WTF! [...]

Salesforce Apex Code for DateTime Duration

I've been developing a lot of batch Apex routines lately. The nature of batch Apex is that it can run whenever resources are available and process many records while being more flexible with platform governor limits. So I might schedule a job to run and it could take anywhere from a few minutes to many hours. Many variables impact the run time of a batch routine. Things like the number of records being processed or platform resource availability. [...]

Apex Code Sample Illustrating How to Drop Leading Zeros

Here is an example regarding the use of the pattern and matcher methods in an Apex class. For this particular code sample I am using the methods to check a passed text string for the occurrence of leading zeros in the string and removing them when they exist. The code I have written here was actually used on a project where I had to validate that User records contained a valid EmployeeNumber value. And, as you probably know, this particular field is editable by users and is stored as text in the database. Rather than go through the trouble of creating another Number type field on the User object I thought it would be easier and less disruptive to simply check the value when I needed to reference it in any Apex logic. [...]

Apex Unit Test: SOQL Filter

Today I participated in an online meeting, which discussed some of the "best practices" for testing Apex code, Visualforce pages, etc. One of the topics that was pretty much skipped but came up during the Q&A portion of the meeting was regarding how to ensure that the test code you write refrains from grabbing any actual live production data and only grabs the records created to facilitate the test. They discussed one way to do this but I have another and I thought it could be useful to other developers. [...]

Visualforce Component for Locale Based DateTime Display

Sometimes, I really dislike Visualforce... Last week I spent a ton of time troubleshooting a display issue for a page that was built by another developer. The issue was that the DateTime field for an object was not displaying properly. It was showing the value in GMT and not the timezone of the user. After spending way too much time reviewing everything I decided to build a custom Visualforce component to eliminate the problem altogether. [...]

sObject Describe Result for Visualforce Picklist

More than a while ago, I wrote about populating query results to a picklist for use in a Visualforce page. That post receives a lot of traffic and I get some additional emails regarding that topic. So I thought I would put together another post similar to that one but with a bit of a twist. In the sample I will cover in this post I am going to show you how to use the methods for the Describe Result sObject in order to create picklists within Visualforce pages. [...]

Custom Picklist in Visualforce Page

Let's say that you're building a Visualforce page and you want to provide a picklist option for your users on the page. If the field where you want to store the selection is a picklist then you have no issue because the field definition will define that the page display a picklist when the Visualforce page is rendered. However, let's say that you want to display a picklist option based on a query from another object. How would you do that? [...]

Automated Exchange Rates in Salesforce.com

Reduce Repetitive Tasks, Eliminate Errors & Free Up Your Administrators.

Birthday Reminders for Salesforce.com

It might lead to a sale. Or it might make you feel good.