Full Stack Developer - a little bit of everything

"Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out." I can truly identify with this. The way we stress ourselves out on deadlines, timelines in today's life without realizing how these artificial borders we draw in the time dimension hurt our own health, our relationships, our family and our own happiness.  What is more important is to pursue what is your true passion. When you do something because you love it, you no longer consider it work, you no longer worry about timelines. Neither you realize time flying by nor will you regret it. 

As I had hoped, I was able to clear the Winter 17 maintenance exam as well for Salesforce Administrators yesterday. Now I am current and up to date with respect to this certification at least. As with the previous one, i wanted to share some pointers to folks who will be taking this exam soon - 1.  With winter 17, we can now create quotes under opportunities in Lightning experience. Please read about this here -   https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/winter17/release-notes/rn_sales_features_core_oppty_add_quotes.htm 2. The Napili template for communities is all the more powerful with new features like ability to show reports/dashboard components, field level help is visible to community users, sales path for leads and opportunities etc. Read about the enhanced community features here -  https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/winter17/release-notes/rn_networks_community_templates.htm 3. Customizable Campaign Influence -  It is now possible to create custom ca

I was able to clear my Summer 16 Salesforce administrator maintence exam earlier today. Next I need to start working on Winter 17 immediately. Anyway before that i thought i will leave some pointers to any folks who may be taking Summer 16 anytime soon Below are some topics you can read about to prepare yourself for the exam - 1. Process builder improvements -  Process builder can now execute immediate actions and then evaluate the next criteria in the flow. Please see this link - https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/summer16/release-notes/rn_forcecom_process_multiple_actions.htm Expect a question on this. 2. Files sharing permission -  In Classic, when a file is shared to a user via a record, its access can be set to "Set by Record". This allows the record level access to determine access level for the file as well. Read about this below - https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/summer16/release-notes/rn_files_access_by_record.htm 3. Chatter Q

Recently i got the opportunity to explore a tool called DBAmp for integration with Salesforce. I found it to be a very useful tool which will help with any data manipulation requirements in Salesforce. Following are my learnings from the exercise. Hope it helps any of you who may need to work with this tool -  DBAmp is a SQL Server package that can be used to integrate with Salesforce. The site where this software is available is - http://www.forceamp.com/ Overview: It essentially installs on top of an existing SQL Server database and provides an OLE DB connector that can be used to connect to Salesforce. Behind the scenes, it executes API calls against Salesforce for any SQL server command it receives. Thus we can create a connection in SQL server to Salesforce org and pull data into tables in the database just as if we are querying against Salesforce tables directly. Use cases for DBAmap + Salesforce: Many use cases exist for using this tool against Salesforce. Pr

In my last post, i tried to explain a use case for custom metadata and talked about its advantages - Salesforce Custom Metadata - Usage and Advantages . As promised in this post, i am going to walk you through an example of what I built for this particular custom metadata type. The use case for this example is detailed in the earlier post. To create a custom metadata, go to Setup -> Develop -> Custom Metadata Types. Click New Custom Metadata Type button and populate the Label details.  Also there is a setting "Visibility" that controls if only a managed package can use this metadata type or any Apex code can use it. I set it to an Apex code based on my use case. Below is the new metadata type i created - On drilling into the new metadata type, you can define what all fields are required to hold the metadata information. I configured two custom fields to capture the queue name and the cutoff time fields. So every record in this metadata type will hav

Custom metadata types in Salesforce is a great and powerful feature provided to developers of the platform. Till this feature was provided, developers could only create and modify metadata for the types provided by Salesforce. They could add new objects, new apex classes etc. With custom metadata, a developer can define a new metadata type itself. After defining a metadata type, the developer can now add metadata records for this new type. Whats the biggest advantage? well since this configuration is considered metadata, it is available via the Metadata API. So it can be migrated between environments using migration tools like ANT . Let me explain below with an example - In our project, we were configuring ability to calculate SLA on a case based on when the case is received into the Queue. That is if the case arrived after a particular time (say 4 PM), it would be considered as arrived next day and SLA should be calculated only from the next day. Now, each queue in the system h