Full Stack Developer - a little bit of everything

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...

I read this advice on a blog from Shana Lebowitz. It is really great advice which will help anyone who wants to try something different in their life -

As developers, this is something we definitely see in our work. However when it ends up showing up on our customer website, it can be very embarrassing for our entire organization. I just saw this on a top multimedia broadcasting company's website. This is pretty embarrassing for a company its size and it also goes to show what a big responsibility all of us in Technology carry. We are definitely in the front line for our organizations now!

This is a great tip for Salesforce administrators that I read about recently in one of my favorite blogs for Salesforce -   Adminhero.com . Many times we encounter requirements asking to alert users on the phone when something important happens in the system. There are different ways to alert users on their mobile - Salesforce1 push notifications and in app notifications:  If you have deployed Salesforce1 mobile app to your users, they can be notified via the app. For example: Chatter notifications which are a result of @Mention in posts can result in a push notification to the user.  Email notifications: Nowadays most enterprise customers have provided their employees access to official mail on mobile phones with appropriate security enabled. So sending email based notifications can many times solve the user requirement. However be mindful of sending too many emails as that reduces the effectiveness of this tool. SM...