Salesforce Admin and Developer Blog

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. [...]

9 February 2016 By Greg Hacic Visualforce, Apex Class, Unit Test, Custom Button, URL Hack, User Interface Read more...

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. [...]

30 September 2015 By Greg Hacic Custom Button, Visualforce, Apex Class Read more...

Pass Values to New Opportunity Using URL

Pass values to a new Opportunity via a custom button using nothing but the URL. This can be useful if you want to default some values on the detail page when new records are being created. It can save your Users some time so they don't need to fill out every field. It will also allow you to provide some guidance for values you want provided when new records are created in your organization. [...]

18 August 2015 By Greg Hacic Custom Button, URL Hack Read more...

Custom Button: Render & Attach PDF

In my last post I provided a template for creating a Visualforce page rendered as a PDF. In this post I am going to show you how to generate that PDF file and attach it to a record within Salesforce by simply clicking a button/link. [...]

7 August 2015 By Greg Hacic Visualforce, Apex Class, Custom Button Read more...

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. [...]

28 March 2014 By Greg Hacic Unit Test, Custom Button, Visualforce, Apex Class Read more...

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. [...]

3 June 2013 By Greg Hacic Visualforce, Apex Class, Unit Test, Custom Button, JavaScript, Communities Read more...

Clone Salesforce Records Using a Custom Button Or Link

Almost four years ago I wrote the first post for this blog. That post had to do with passing field values in a URL in order to populate those values on an edit page. What's interesting is that the original post still gets a ton of traffic. So I'd like to expand on that topic again in this post and illustrate how you can build on that original logic in order to do something useful. In this case, I want to create a custom button that will clone a User record and remove certain fields so that I don't have to fill out so much information when I create new Users. [...]

13 August 2011 By Greg Hacic Custom Button, URL Hack Read more...

Dynamic Salesforce Report from Custom Button

I recently attended the Buffalo Salesforce User Group meeting. During the session a guest speaker conducted a demo of some development he did for his company's production Salesforce org. One of the items he touched on that spurred a lot of discussion was a custom button he built to pass a value to a report from a detail page of a given record. The resulting discussion was surprising because I really didn't know that so many admins were unaware of the benefits of creating these custom buttons. And, after participating in the discussion, I thought that this would be a great topic for a blog post because there is so much that you can do if you understand this relatively simple trick. [...]

28 February 2011 By Greg Hacic Custom Button, Report Read more...

Custom Salesforce Button to Execute JavaScript

I make everyone on my team track their time using a custom Time_Card__c object in our Salesforce org. At the end of each pay period I have to update the Status field on these Time_Card__c records to something and most often the status is set to 'Paid.' Since it can be frustrating to update many records repeatedly to the same value and some folks don't like using the Excel Connector or Data Loader to perform mass updates, I thought that it would be easier to create a custom button where I could select the records from a Time Card list view or Project Detail page related list and then click a button and have Salesforce update the records in mass via JavaScript. [...]

14 July 2010 By Greg Hacic JavaScript, Custom Button Read more...