Simon Fell > Its just code

Thursday, October 25, 2012

The future of SF3

SF3 was one of the first OSX/Salesforce tools I wrote, made possible by an API in OSX called Sync Services. With the release of OSX 10.8 (aka Mountain Lion) Apple officially deprecated the Sync Services API (and its future was in doubt for a quite a while prior to that). With this news the future for SF3 is that it doesn't have any future, there is no new API that replaces the functionality of Sync Services. There are APIs to talk to both Address Book and iCal, but without the sync engine piece an app that wanted to sync data between those apps and a 3rd party is going to have to build the entire sync/match/change log functionality itself, a big job. Its possible that exposing the salesforce data using CalDav and CardDav might make it usable from OSX, but I haven't had time to investigate that in any detail.

Thursday, September 06, 2012

Software Engineering metrics

Easy to digest venn diagram explaining everything thats wrong with the typical metrics used in software engineering.

Friday, March 02, 2012

Handling binary http response in apex.

For quite a while now you've been able to make HTTP requests from Apex to other services, this was aimed at integrations for structured data, xml or json, and so would deal with strings. This made life easier if you were actually doing xml or json, but makes life difficult to impossible if you were trying to deal with binary data. In the recent Spring release this is fixed, and you can now work with binary data (blobs in apex) directly in the http request or response. Here's an example of making a HTTP GET request for an image PNG file, and saving it to the document object in salesforce

HttpRequest r = new HttpRequest();
r.setMethod('GET');
r.setEndpoint('http://www.pocketsoap.com/osx/soqlx/soqlxicon.png');
Http http = new Http();
HttpResponse res = http.send(r);
blob image = res.getBodyAsBlob();

Document d = new Document();
d.name = 'logo.png';
d.body = image;
d.folderId = UserInfo.getUserId();
insert d;
system.debug(d.id);

(Yes, this may well be my one blog post for this year)

Friday, February 18, 2011

Hudson/Jenkins plugin for Chatter notifications

Hudson is a popular continuous integration build server, I've been working on a plugin for it that will post build notifications to chatter. The plugin is configurable, so that it can post updates to its own wall, to a specific group (perhaps the project team that owns the build), or to a specific data record (perhaps you have a custom object that represents a build).

You can grab the source and a prebuilt plugin binary from the projects home page on github.

Monday, June 07, 2010

ZKSforce now with iPhone OS support.

ZKSforce is the Cocoa library i wrote to make it easier to access the Salesforce.com API from Cocoa / Objective-C. I just posted a new version that uses the Salesforce.com v19 API, and has switched out its use of NSXML & NSCalendarDate with libxml & NSDate and so is now compatible with both OSX and iPhone based projects. (iPhone OS 3.2 and up should be good).

AppleScript connector

The Applescript Connector for Salesforce.com allows you to write applescript that can interact with the salesforce.com API, login, create, update & delete data, run queries, retrieve your scherma's metadata all from Applescript. Now you can more easily integrate Salesforce.com with your OSX desktop and applications.

Friday, May 14, 2010

Schema visualization with GraphViz

A friend recently turned me onto Instaviz, a great iPhone / iPad diagraming tool based on graphviz. Graphviz lets you define your diagram as a set of nodes and connections, and it will perform the layout for you. I have something of an interest in being able to visualize your salesforce.com schema, and some lines of python code later, i had something that would generate a graphviz description of your schema, starting from a primary object, and with the option to go 1 or more levels deep from there. Here's an example for Opportunity, just 1 level deep. (click for full size version)

And here's the generated oppty.gv file that produces that graph. If you have Instaviz or one of the desktop viewers for graphviz, you can open the .gv file directly in those apps. (and/or you can use the commandline tools to generate a png or other formats).

Here's the actual python code, it uses beatbox to call the describeSObject API to discover the schema for your login. You run it as

python gv.py someuser@sample.org mypassword Opportunity > oppty.gv

Here's an even larger model that's 5 levels deep from Account - png rendering (ouch its 6MB), gv (33k)

[Also available Belorussian translation provided by Patricia]

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Uploading files to Salesforce Content

The API allows you to create new entries for Salesforce content by creating new ContentVersion records, you'll at a minimum need to fill out the VersionData which is the actual binary data for the file, and the pathOnClient, which is used to derive the file type, and its title. This will automatically create a new content record and put it in your personal workspace. For a twist here's an example in VisualForce rather than a SOAP based client (the Web Services API & Apex both share the same data model, so everything transfers over).

Here's the controller, called contentController, this just has a Blob property and a go method to create the actual ContentVersion row

public class contentController {

    public blob file { get; set; }
    
    public PageReference go() {
        ContentVersion v = new ContentVersion();
        v.versionData = file;
        v.title = 'from VF';
        v.pathOnClient ='/foo.txt';
        insert v;
        return new PageReference('/' + v.id);
    }
}

And for the VisualForce page, i just used the apex:inputFile to bind to it, nothing pretty, but it'll get you going. You'll probably want to do something more interesting with the title and pathOnClient properties.

<apex:form controller="contentController">
<apex:inputFile value="{!file}" />

<apex:commandbutton action="{!go}" value="go"/>
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

One variation is to have your controller expose a ContentVersion object directly, e.g.

public class contentController {

    public contentController() {
        file = new ContentVersion();
    }
    
    public ContentVersion file { get; set; }
    
    public PageReference go() {
        insert file;
        return new PageReference('/' + file.id);
    }
}	

And have the page bind directly to its properties.

<apex:page controller="contentController">
<apex:form >
<apex:inputFile value="{!file.versionData}" fileName="{!file.pathOnClient}" />
<apex:commandbutton action="{!go}" value="go"/>
</apex:form>
</apex:page>

If you want to experiment with the Content APi, you'll need to have signed up for a developer edition org recently (or go sign up a new one), and turn on the content license for the admin user.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Updates

I updated the Quicksilver plugin for Salesforce.com to support Chatter, you can easily post status updates, URLs & Files to Chatter now from Quicksilver.

There's a minor revision to Trapdoor that adds Google Chrome to the list of available browsers.

SoqlX was updated to support the Salesforce.com v18 API, so that you can do aggregate queries etc, it also now tries much harder to preserve the field ordering in the table from the query.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

OSX / Salesforce tools updates

I updated the OSX build of the data loader to v17, so now you can access v17 specific objects (like content) and use the new bulk api. And I also updated the TextMate Plugin for apex to v17 as well.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

PocketSOAP v1.5.5

I just posted PocketSOAP v1.5.5, this is updated to use the latest version of PocketHTTP, and the dateTime & time support has been updated to support milliseconds. However because the COM APIs do not expose milliseconds accessors for the dateTime type, this is likely only useful for c++ based clients that can access the underlying double directly.

Saturday, July 04, 2009

v16 Data Loader for OSX

I built an up to date (api v16) OSX version of the data loader, and feel free to vote for the idea to make it official.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

App Updates

I released an updated SoqlX a couple of weeks back, it has a number of tweaks, exposing relationship names to make building SOQL-R queries easier, and the filtering object/field list I discussed earlier. And I just posted an updated version of SFFS, the file extension information is now bundled into the filenames for those files that don't have it in the name directly (depending on how your documents got into salesforce to start with, they might have the extension separate to the name). Follow me on twitter to find out these things as they happen.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

SoqlX Filters

Following on from the filtered object/field list discussion, seems like showing all the fields and highlighting the matching ones seems like the best bet (but filtering the list of objects based on the object name, or the object having a field matching the filter), expect to find this in the next release of SoqlX.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

SoqlX Filters

I've been thinking about adding a filter widget to the object/field list in SoqlX, right now i have so that the object list is filtered based on whether the object name or any of its fields match the filter criteria, but the actual list of fields for the object remains intact. (as shown on the left). Is that what you would find most useful? should it also filter the field list itself ? something else? (I also thought about leaving it with the full list of fields, but having it highlight the fields that match the filter). Ping me on twitter and let me know what you think.