TehNrd

I recently saw a tweet that included nothing but a link and a lot of salesforce.com related tags.

Visual Force Blows (link was shortened in original tweet so I couldn’t see title)

What could this be I pondered? A new product announcement? A glowing review of the force.com platform? Upon clicking the link I entered the “I hate Apex and Visualforce Zone” (Dun Dun Dunnnnnnnnnnn). Some dude on a blog (man, everyone has a blog now days) is trying to build a dynamic link menu with data pulled from salesforce objects and using visualforce to display. This seems pretty normal right? Let us check out some excerpts first:

On Apex and Visualforce:

Sounds great in theory, however in reality it makes you want to stab yourself. A lot.

I on the other hand would bathe in it if I could. Oh ya….Visualforce and Apex, sooo bubbly clean. Ya, that was weird. Let’s move on.
Read more…

Tomorrow, January 7th, there will be another Force.com Developer Meeting in Seattle (first Thursday of every month). If you develop on the Force.com platform with Apex, Visualforce, use the API, or want to learn more about these topics please feel free to join us.

Date: Thursday, January 7th.

Time: 8:00 – 10:00 AM PST

Location: West Monroe Partners
1215 4^th Ave Suite 1010
Seattle, WA 98109

The West Monroe Partners office is located on the 10^th floor.

Public Parking garages are located in the building, as well as in a 1-2 block radius. The area is also well serviced by public transportation.

The agenda for this meeting will be as follows:

• Presentation/Demo – Jason Venable (tehnrd.com) will be demoing his runner up application he created for the most recent Force.com Cloud Developer Challenge. The site is GameForce and includes two games: Blackjack and multiplayer connect four. (http://tehnrd-developer-edition.na7.force.com/gamehome). It was built with 100% Force.com, no flash or JavaScript. Jason is a Salesforce.com Admin and Developer at F5 focused mainly on process automation for the worldwide sales team.
• Open forum – opportunity to discuss any questions/issues you may have about all things Salesforce

If you are planning on attending this month’s meeting, please send me an email (vgrasparil@westmonroepartners.com) to RSVP.

If you would like to present an application you have built or share some best practices you have learned with the group, please let me know so we can schedule it into a future meeting.

See you on January 7th!

Yup, thats me! I’ll be showing off the gaming site I built on force.com, http://www.tehnrd.com/gameforce/. I’ll show off the basic UI stuff but we will also peel back the covers to see how it works the magic on the back end.

Batch Apex is here and it is cool. In some of the demos and webinars salesforce.com has put together you may have seen a status bar that represents how far along a batch job has proceeded. This is useful as you only need but a quick glance to see how your batch jobs are doing. Below is an image of what this would look like.

All of this magic status bar stuff is pretty simple. You have two divs, an inner and an outer that construct the status bar, the inner being the percent complete. All of the info to construct this status bar is located in a sObject called AsyncApexJob. This stores information about your batch jobs and other asynchronous operations.

The two important fields in this object are JobItemsProcessed and TotalJobItems. When a batch job is executing it may process millions of records but it will break these up into batches of 200, or less if defined……hence the name Batch Apex. So if I have 5,000 records to be processed there would be 25 batches of 200. In the AsyncApexJob object these 25 batches would be the TotalJobItems. As the job runs the number JobItemsProcessed will increase as the batches are completed.

Now that we have these two number calculating the percent complete is an utterly simple division equation. JobItemsProcessed divided by TotalJobItems times 100 gives us the percent complete. We then pass this value to the width of the inner div and our status bar is complete! To give the status bar the appearance of being animated we add an actionPoller to the page and rerender the table of batch jobs every five seconds which will intern update that status bar with the new values.

As always there is a fun little demo to play with and you can access that here: Click here for nifty cool demo.

I’ve also packaged up this component so you can install it directly to your org. You can download it here.

Here is all the code and markup. First the page that will contain the batchJobs component.

<apex:page controller="batchStatus">
    <apex:form>
        <apex:commandButton value="Start Batch Job" action="{!startBatch}" reRender="jobs,error"/> 
        <apex:outputText id="error" value="{!error}" style="font-weight: bold; color: red"/>
 
        <br/><br/>
        <c:batchJobs id="jobs" numberOfJobs="20"/>
    </apex:form>
</apex:page>

Next we have the Visualforce component:

<apex:component controller="batchJobs" selfClosing="true">
    <apex:attribute name="numberOfJobs" type="Integer" assignTo="{!numberOfJobs}" description="The number of batch jobs to display in the table."/>
 
    <!-- Here is the css styles that will be used for the progress bars -->
    <style>
        .progressBar{
            background-color: #f8f8f8;
            border:1px solid #DDDDDD;
            height: 19px;
            width: 300px;
            -moz-border-radius: 5px; 
            -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
        }
        .progress{
            background-color: #F7B64B;
            border:1px solid #E78F08;
            height: 100%;
            margin: -1px;
            text-align: center;
            -moz-border-radius: 5px; 
            -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
            line-height: 18px;
        }
    </style>
 
    <!-- This action poller will check the status of the batch jobs every 5 seconds -->
    <apex:actionPoller rerender="jobs" interval="5"/>
 
    <apex:pageBlock title="Batch Apex Jobs">
        <apex:pageBlockTable value="{!batchJobs}" var="b" id="jobs">
            <apex:column headerValue="Apex Class" value="{!b.job.ApexClass.Name}"/>
            <apex:column value="{!b.job.CreatedDate}"/>
            <apex:column value="{!b.job.CreatedById}"/>
            <apex:column value="{!b.job.Status}"/>
            <apex:column width="320px" >
 
                <!-- Here with have two divs that construct our progresses bar. An outter which is the entire bar,
                and and inner that represents the percent complete. We simply pass the percentComplete value to
                the inner div width and this will show how far along the job is. Brilliant! -->
 
                <div class="progressBar">
                    <div class="progress" style="width: {!b.percentComplete}%;">
                        {!b.percentComplete}%
                    </div>
                </div>
 
            </apex:column>
            <apex:column value="{!b.job.CompletedDate}"/>
        </apex:pageBlockTable>
    </apex:pageBlock>
 
</apex:component>

And finally the custom controller for the component….. where all the magic happens:

public class batchJobs{
 
    public List<BatchJob> batchJobs;
    public Integer numberOfJobs {get; set;}
 
    public List<BatchJob> getBatchJobs(){
        //Create new list of BatchJobs, a wrapper class that includes the job and percent complete.
        batchJobs = new List();
 
        //If number of jobs was not defined, default to 20
        if(numberOfJobs== null || numberofJobs <= 0){
            numberofJobs = 20;
        }
 
        //Query the Batch apex jobs
        for(AsyncApexJob a : [select TotalJobItems, Status, NumberOfErrors, MethodName, JobType, JobItemsProcessed, Id, CreatedDate, CreatedById, CompletedDate, ApexClassId, ApexClass.Name From AsyncApexJob order by CreatedDate desc limit :numberOfJobs]){
            Double itemsProcessed = a.JobItemsProcessed;
            Double totalItems = a.TotalJobItems;
 
            BatchJob j = new BatchJob();
            j.job = a;
 
            //Determine the pecent complete based on the number of batches complete
            if(totalItems == 0){
                //A little check here as we don't want to divide by 0.
                j.percentComplete = 0;
            }else{
                j.percentComplete = ((itemsProcessed  / totalItems) * 100.0).intValue();
            }
 
            batchJobs.add(j);
        }
        return batchJobs;
    }
 
    //This is the wrapper class the includes the job itself and a value for the percent complete
    public Class BatchJob{
        public AsyncApexJob job {get; set;}
        public Integer percentComplete {get; set;}
    }
 
    /*--------------------TEST METHOD------------------------*/
    static testMethod void batchStatusBarTest(){
        batchJobs controller = new batchJobs();
        controller.getBatchJobs();
    }
}

I initially planned on adding all sorts of cool features to this component such as color coding the status bar based on the status of the job and estimated time to completion. These were axed in 1.0 as it was taking too long and there our some other cool posts I have lined up that I want to get working on. Maybe in the future I’ll post an updated version of this component with all the flair it deserves.

UPDATE:

I’ve been asked a couple times what exactly happens when a user clicks the <apex:commandButton value=”Start Batch Job” action=”{!startBatch}” reRender=”jobs,error”/> button. This calls a very simple method in the controller that starts a batch job.

public void startBatch(){
	error = '';
	batchJob job = new batchJob();
	List<AsyncApexJob> openJobs = [select Id from AsyncApexJob where Status = 'Processing' OR Status = 'Queued']; 
 
	if(openJobs.size() < 5){
	        ID batchprocessid = Database.executeBatch(job);
	}else{
		error = 'WHOA BUDDY! Only five batch jobs at a time.';
	}
}

And here is the batch apex job.

global class batchJob implements Database.Batchable<SObject>{
 
    global database.querylocator start(Database.BatchableContext bc){
        return Database.getQueryLocator('select Id, Name from Account where Type = \'Batch Test\'');
    }
 
    global void execute(Database.BatchableContext bc, sObject[] objects){
        List<Account> accns = new List<Account>();
 
        for(sObject s : objects){
            Account a = (Account)s;
            a.Description = 'batch testing. blah blah blah.  ' + system.now();  
            accns.add(a);
        }
        update accns;
    }
 
    global void finish(Database.BatchableContext bc){
       system.debug('all done');
    }
}

I’ve been working with Apex for a little over two years now and I still learn little tips and tricks all the time.

Today I ran in to a somewhat peculiar problem when trying to catch errors on the insertion of a record. Here is the scenario in super pseudo apex code.

1) Set a database save point with Apex
2) Insert a record with Apex
3) Some type of validation error prevents the record from being inserted
4) Using a try-catch statement catch the error and display it to user
5) Roll back to your Database savepoint
6) Allow the user to fix the error.
7) When the save occurs the second time I would receive this error: “cannot specify Id in an insert call”

Huh, wait….what? The insert failed because of the validation rule, right? Kinda, sort of, it’s not really clear. Even though the insert failed my object in memory was still being assigned an Id. This caused a problem when trying to insert the second time.

I’m guessing salesforce.com sets the ID of a record before the insert as you can’t set values after inserts as the object would become read-only. Similar to how triggers work, you can only write values before inserts and updates, not after. When the operation fails the Id in the code is not removed. This is a giant guess on how the process works and it could be totally wrong.

So how to get around this problem? The solution is fairly simple. In the catch section of the code we want to clone the record without preserving the Id and assign this clone back to the original object. Something like this:

Savepoint sp = Database.setSavepoint(); 
try{		
	insert object;
}catch(exception e){
	Database.rollback(sp); 
	object = object.clone(false);
	return null;		
}

The false parameter in the clone method makes an exact copy of the object without preserving the Id. So the next time the user attempts to save, the Id is null, and there should be no issues.

When you build your first few triggers everything is so peaceful. The grass is green, the birds are chirping, and everything is working wonderfully. You continue to develop more triggers, classes, batch jobs, @future classes, and then one day your realize, “Great Scott!, I have created a monster”. If you connected all the classes and triggers that were related it would look like a giant spaghetti dinner.

When this happens you will undoubtedly run into one very specific problem. You have a piece of code A that causes code B to execute which then causes code A to execute which then causes code B to execute. OH NO! Infinite loop, governor limits AHHHHH!

Fear not! For there is a very simple solution to this problem. The extremely clear and concise diagram below shows a common scenario.

Let’s say we have an update trigger that sends a group of objects to be processed by an @future asynchronous method. There is a good chance this method will need to update the records. This would normally cause the trigger to execute and the @future method to be called again, hence our unstoppable loop. So how do we stop this loop? Before we perform the update on the records we need to say, “Hey, this is a update from a @future methods, don’t do anything”. We can do this by creating a simple Boolean value in a utility class and can be accessed by anycode in context of the update operation.

Below is the code of how something like this would work. First let’s look at the very simple solution. Yup, this is it. Some minor changes to our @future and trigger code and this is it.

public class Utility{
 
    public static boolean isFutureUpdate;
 
}

Here is the trigger, we only want the code in this trigger to execute if the isFutureUpdate variable is not true.

trigger updateSomething on Account (after insert, after update) {
 
    /*We only want this trigger to perform it's logic when the
    update is not from an @future method */
    if(Utility.isFutureUpdate != true){
 
        Set<Id> idsToProcess = new Se<Id>();
 
        for(Account acct : trigger.new){
            if(acct.NumberOfEmployees > 500){
                idsToProcess.add(acct.Id);
            }
        }
 
        //Send Ids to @future method for processing
        futureMethods.processLargeAccounts(idsToProcess);
 
    }
}

And here is our @future method. The only thing we need to add is one line of code to set the isFutureUpdate variable to true before we perform the update.

public class FutureMethods{
 
    @future
    public static void processLargeAccounts(Set<Id> acctIDs){
 
        List<Account> acctsToUpdate = new List<Account>();
 
        /* Do awesome stuff with apex code */
 
        /*Before we perform this update we want to set the 
        isFutureUpdate boolean in our utility class to true */
        Utility.isFutureUpdate = true;
 
        /*Now we can perform the update. The trigger will still 
        fire but none of the code inside of it will execute and
        this method will not be called again*/
        update acctsToUpdate;
    }
}

Now when the trigger is fired the @future method will not be called again.

This example shows the interaction between asynchronous operations but you can use this same solution if you have triggers that update triggers and cause a loop.

This is sort of a late notice but on October 1st there will be a Force.com user group in Seattle. If you are in the area and want to exchange ideas and best practices revolving around the Force.com platform please swing by.

Want to take a deeper dive into the technical capabilities of Salesforce? Would you like to meet other Force.com developers in the Seattle area? Interested in learning about new/different tools that will help you create and develop better solutions? A new Salesforce user group will be starting up on Thursday Oct 1. Meetings will be held on the first Thursday of every month.

We will try to cover a different range of topics at these monthly meetings such as:

• Summary of new functionality in the upcoming release
• Project spotlight where someone will demo their project and the technical details
• Best Practices
• 3rd Party development and integration tools
• Apex and VisualForce
• Open session to discuss specific questions you may have regarding your current projects

Time: 8-9am
Date: Oct 1, 2009
Location:

West Monroe Partners
1215 4th Ave Suite 1010
Seattle, WA 98161

Please contact Val Grasparil (vgrasparil@westmonroepartners.com) or Andrew Brown (abrown@westmonroepartners.com) if you have any questions.

Since it is in the morning, coffee and snacks will be provided. Please RSVP if you are planning on attending so we can make sure to have enough food for everyone.

Reach out directly to Val to RSVP. I’ve been told there is public parking available at the address above.

Update: Video posted below.

This is my first post in nearly three weeks and my first Force.com related post in nearly a month. Where have I been you may wonder? Only working on the coolest Force.com site in the world .  Haha, just kidding.  But yes, for the past 2 months I have been slowly chipping away on my entry for the Force.com Cloud Developer Challenge. So what did I build?

Gameforce - The Worlds 1′st online gaming site built upon the Force.com platform.

When I set out to build my entry I wanted to build something that had never been done before. We have all see the blogging, HR, accounting, shopping cart, content management, and many other traditional business apps. There is no doubt these can be super cool but in the end most of them have been done before. Salesforce.com and Force.com are typically viewed as a platform for business apps and I wanted to build something on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. I hope I have succeeded with building an online gaming site.

The site consists of two games: blackjack and LineUp4 aka Connect 4.

Blackjack
Place your bets and play against the dealer.

LineUp4

A true online multiplayer game where two people can play against each other anywhere in the world. It also has the ‘Smack Talker’ which is live chat between the players. You can see more features listed on the about page located here.

This site may not have the coolest graphics or the trendiest web design but when it comes to taking the Force.com platform to the limit I have used every trick in the book that I know about. When checking out this site keep in mind it was built with 100% Force.com. There is no extra javascript, flash, or any other web technology.

Video update:
After seeing how cool some of the videos were that other people created showing of their site  I created one as well. It gives a great overview in about 5 minuets. The one feature I forgot to mention in the video is that if you are playing a game of LineUp4 and are not logged in, you can log in, and will be returned to the game right where you left off. The game state will be saved.

http://tehnrd.com/gameforce.swf (if the video is to large for your screen, right click on the video and select ‘Show All’)

Now we wait for the results of the contest. I’m hoping this site puts me in contention for the Mac Book prize. I’m sure there are going to be some great entries but I’m hoping for the best since this site is like nothing I have ever seen before. My current computer is also 5 years old so a new pc definitely wouldn’t hurt. With so many entries in this contest perhaps salesforce could give away a more than one Mac Book ?

Also, due to the very dynamic nature of this site and the fact that it is currently hosted on a developer edition account I fully expect to exceed the site limits if this site gets popular. I have mirrored this site an a Force.com Free Edition account located here but it does not have the log in ability.

And one more thing. Thanks to my awesome wife for putting up with me while I constantly snuck away to work on this site.

One of the most common request you will see when perusing the Visualforce discussion boards is that developers want some sort of pop up box to display or gather more information. Due to the way Visualforce works a traditional pop up box won’t always work as this is a separate window and the state of one controller/extensions can not be accessed from two different windows. Each new window gets a new instance of the controller.

The most commonly recommended way to address this is issue is to use a modal dialog box similar to this or this. These work great but sticking to my anti javascript 100% native Visualforce mantra I assumed there must be an alternative to incorporating external javascript libraries. These libraries can add really cool and polished features but usually at the expense of more complexity and potentially higher maintenance.

I decided to take a stab at creating a 100% native Visualforce pop up and I’m pretty happy with the results. You can check out the demo here:

http://tehnrd-developer-edition.na7.force.com/popup

I’ll be the first to say this method is not perfect. The pop up may not always display in the exact center of the screen as it does not inspect the window size to dynamically center the pop up. Even with this limitation it tends to work pretty good 90% of the time. EDIT: css has been updated below and this is no longer an issue.

This code and markup is pretty simple so I didn’t add a lot of comments but if you have any questions please leave a comment below.

First lets take a look at the page.

<apex:page controller="popup">
    <apex:form >
        <apex:commandButton value="Show Pop up" action="{!showPopup}" rerender="popup"/>
        <apex:pageBlock >
            Lorem ipsum ..... dummy stuff to show the popup is above content
        </apex:pageBlock>
 
        <apex:outputPanel id="popup">
            <apex:outputPanel styleClass="customPopup" layout="block" rendered="{!displayPopUp}">
                Lorem ipsum <br/><br/><br/>
                <apex:commandButton value="Hide Pop up" action="{!closePopup}" rerender="popup"/>
            </apex:outputPanel>
        </apex:outputPanel>
 
    </apex:form>
 
    <style type="text/css">
       .customPopup{
            background-color: white;
            border-style: solid;
            border-width: 2px;
            left: 50%;
            padding:10px;
            position: absolute;
            z-index: 9999;
            /* These are the 3 css properties you will need to tweak so the pop 
            up displays in the center of the screen. First set the width. Then set 
            margin-left to negative half of what the width is. You can also add 
            the height property for a fixed size pop up.*/
            width: 500px;
            margin-left: -250px;
            top:100px;
        }
    </style>
</apex:page>

And the controller, very simple.

public class popup {
 
    public boolean displayPopup {get; set;}
 
    public void closePopup() {
        displayPopup = false;
    }
 
    public void showPopup() {
        displayPopup = true;
    }
}

Okay, so maybe it isn’t exactly a super cool advanced lookup, but it is a lookup, and it is cool. Title at least got your attention right? No? Darn.

So what is a super cool advanced lookup you may ask? It is basically text field that as you start to type it becomes a picklist of values depending on the text you are typing. You can have it lookup records on any object that has a Name field. This type of functionality can be done with javascript libraries (examples here) but why do that if you can build something that performs just as well using only Apex and Visualforce? I did play around with the ext.js library and it is definitely more polished but on very large data sets performance was not that good. As I would type it felt like it was freezing up. To me this is much more annoying than a slight delay the VF component makes when performing the SOQL query.

Here is the example page, enjoy: http://tehnrd-developer-edition.na7.force.com/comboBox

First we will take a look at the component named advancedLookup. This component has 4 important attributes:
- object: The object you would like to search, Account, Contact, MyCustomObject__c, etc.
- value: This component returns an Id value and this must be bound to a value in your page’s controller or extension
- maxHeight: As you begin you type a picklist will appear of matching results and you must set the default height.
- width: Depending on the object searched the Name may only be 15 characters wide or it could be 250. Here you set the width so the names are readable.

<apex:component controller="advancedLookUp" >
    <apex:attribute name="object" assignTo="{!objectType}" required="true" type="string" description="The object this component will search."/>
    <apex:attribute name="value" assignTo="{!selectValue}" required="true" type="object" description="A merge feld that references the controller class variable that is associated with this feld. This must be an Id field."/>
    <apex:attribute name="maxHeight" assignTo="{!maxHeight}" required="true" type="Integer" description="Max height of selectList."/>
    <apex:attribute name="width" required="true" type="string" description="Width of the component in pixels or percent."/>
    <apex:attribute name="style" type="string" description="The style used to display the inputText component, used primarily for adding inline CSS styles."/>
    <apex:outputPanel layout="block" style="{!style}">
 
            <!-- This is our input text that we will use in a wildcard search against the names of the defined object. We refresh the results every time this field
            is clicked or a letter is entered (keyup) -->
            <apex:inputText value="{!searchValue}" style="width:{!width}" id="searchValue">
                <apex:actionSupport event="onkeyup" action="{!search}" rerender="resultsPanel"/>
                <apex:actionSupport event="onclick" action="{!search}" rerender="resultsPanel"/>
            </apex:InputText>
 
            <!-- Once we perform the query on the object we will populate this list with the returned values. When a user selects a value we will hide this list
            and auto complete the selected value -->
            <apex:outputPanel id="resultsPanel" layout="block" style="position: absolute;">
                <apex:selectList value="{!value}" size="{!height}" style="width:{!width}" rendered="{!showList}" >
                    <apex:selectOptions value="{!results}"/>
                    <apex:actionSupport event="onchange" action="{!selectvalue}" rerender="resultsPanel,searchValue"/>
                </apex:selectList>
            </apex:outputPanel>
 
    </apex:outputPanel>
 
    <!-- This component has one little piece of javascript. If a user clicks on the screen before selecting a value we want to hide the list of options similar to
    how a normal picklist behaves -->
    <apex:actionFunction name="hideResults" action="{!hideResults}" reRender="resultsPanel"/>
    <script type="text/javascript">
        document.onclick = function(){
            hideResults();
        }
    </script>
</apex:component>

Next the controller for this this custom component:

public class advancedLookUp{
 
    public Object selectValue{get; set;}
    public String objectType {get; set;}
    public String searchValue {get; set;}
    public Integer maxHeight {get; set;}
    public Integer height {get; set;}
    public List<SelectOption> results {get; set;}
    public Boolean showList {get; set;}
    Map<String,String> resultsMap;
 
    //This is our seach method that is called every time a character is entered
    public void search(){
        showList = true;
        results = new List<SelectOption>();
        resultsMap = new Map<String,String>();
 
        //Using dynamic SOQL we pass the object and the search value
        if(searchValue.length() > 0){
            String entry = '%' + searchValue + '%';
            String queryString = 'Select Id, Name from ' + objectType + ' where Name like :entry order by Name limit 1000';
 
            /*Next we add the results to our list of selectOptions. We also add the values to a map so that when a value
            is selected we can auto fill the search box with the selected value */
            for(sObject o : Database.query(queryString)){
                results.add(new SelectOption((String)o.get('Id'),(String)o.get('Name')));
                resultsMap.put((String)o.get('Id'),(String)o.get('Name'));
            }
        }
 
        //Next we inspect the results to set the height and contents of the selectList
        if(searchValue.length() == 0){
            showList = false;
        }else if(results.size() == 0 && searchValue.length() != 0){
            results.add(new SelectOption('','No matches found'));
            height = 2;
        }else if(results.size() == 1){
            height = 2;
        }else if(results.size() > maxHeight){
            height = maxHeight;
        }else{
            height = results.size();
        }
    }
 
    //When a value is selected we will auto complete the searchValue
    public void selectValue(){
        showList = false;
        searchValue = resultsMap.get((string)selectValue);
    }
 
    //simply hides the list of results
    public void hideResults(){
        showList = false;
    }
}

Almost there now. Up next the page and page controller:

<apex:page controller="coolLookUp">
    Try searching with 'e', 'oil', 'az', 'install', etc then click the Show button.
 
    <apex:form >
        <!-- This is only line need for the advanced lookup. The value is bound to an ID variable in this page's controller. When you click the button it 
        refreshes the detail panel and displays the selected opp -->
        <c:advancedLookup object="Opportunity" value="{!oppId}" maxHeight="20" width="250px" style="float: left"/> 
        <apex:commandButton value="Show" rerender="detail" style="float: left" status="status"/>
        <apex:actionStatus startText="elevator music...." id="status"/>      
        <apex:outputPanel id="detail">
            <apex:detail subject="{!oppId}"/>
        </apex:outputPanel>
    </apex:form>
</apex:page>

Doesn’t get much more simple than this:

public class coolLookUp {
    public Id oppId {get; set;}
}

FYI, there is an issue if you try to use this component more than once on a page but I have not yet had the time to investigate.

With Force.com sites now in GA it is possible to create public facing web forms and save directly to your salesforce.com database. You can do point of entry validation, auto fill fields based on the user, and all sort of other awesomeness. One problem with public facing forms is they are prone to spam, lots of spam. The best approach is to prevent the spam from even being submitted in the first place. This is usually done with some sort of CAPTCHA validation.

Ron Hess put together a great little article here on how you can use reCAPTCHA. It works great but (there is always a but) it requires setting up a web service callout, using javascript, and isn’t the the most straight forward CAPTCHA to setup. I am all about 100% salesforce.com. Javascript libraries and external services are great but if I can do the same thing with 100% Apex and Visualforce I’m all for that.

With this mindset I set out to create a CAPTCHA utility built 100% on the force.com platform. I think my results where pretty darn successful. It isn’t super fancy but I think it will get the job done……but then again it hasn’t exactly been tested against spam bots. Oh well, it’s still cool.

You can check out a working example here: http://tehnrd-developer-edition.na7.force.com/captcha

And here is the code, first the page:

<apex:page controller="captcha" >
 
    Enter only the <strong>black</strong> characters.
    <apex:outputPanel styleClass="container" layout="block" id="code">
        <apex:outputText value="{!char1}" styleClass="blackChar"/>
        <apex:outputText value="{!char2}" styleClass="redChar"/>
        <apex:outputText value="{!char3}" styleClass="blackChar"/>
        <apex:outputText value="{!char4}" styleClass="redChar"/>
        <apex:outputText value="{!char5}" styleClass="blackChar"/>
        <apex:outputText value="{!char6}" styleClass="redChar"/>
    </apex:outputPanel>
 
    <apex:form >
        <apex:inputText value="{!input}"/>
        <apex:commandButton action="{!validate}" value="Validate" rerender="result"/>
        <apex:commandButton value="Reset" rerender="code"/>
    </apex:form>
 
    <apex:outputPanel id="result">
        {!result}
    </apex:outputPanel>
 
    <style>
        .redChar{
            color: #C30000;
            font-size: 24px;
            padding:5px;
        }
        .blackChar{
            color: black;
            font-weight: bold;
            font-size: 24px;
            padding:5px;
        }
        .container{
            background-color: #E8E8E8;
            border-style: solid;
            border-width:1px;
            width: 150px;
            text-align: center;
        }
    </style>
</apex:page>

And next the controller:

public class captcha {
 
    List<String> characters;
    public String input {get; set;}
    public String result {get; set;}
    String char1;
    String char3;
    String char5;
 
    //In our contructor we will populate a list of strings with numbers and letters
    public captcha(){
        characters = new List<String>{'a','b','c','d','e','f','g','h',
            'i','j','k','l','m','n','o','p','q','r','s','t','u','v','w',
            'x','y','z','1','2','3','4','5','6','7','8','9','0'
        };
    }
 
    //This methods simply returns a random number between 0 and the size of the character list
    public Integer randomNumber(){
        Integer random = Math.Round(Math.Random() * characters.Size());
        if(random == characters.size()){
            random--;
        }
        return random;
    }
 
    /*Here we have 6 get methods that return 6 random characters to the page.
    For chars 1,3, and 5 (the black characters) we are saving the the values so 
    that we can compare them with the user's input */
    public String getChar1(){
        char1 = characters[randomNumber()];
        return char1;
    }
    public String getChar2(){
        return characters[randomNumber()];
    }
    public String getChar3(){
        char3 = characters[randomNumber()];
        return char3;
    }
    public String getChar4(){
        return characters[randomNumber()];
    }
    public String getChar5(){
        char5 = characters[randomNumber()];
        return char5;
    }
    public String getChar6(){
        return characters[randomNumber()];
    }
 
    /*In the validate method we make sure that the 3 characters entered equal the three black characters: char1, char3, char5*/
    public void validate(){
        if(input.length() == 3 && input.subString(0,1) == char1 && input.subString(1,2) == char3 && input.subString(2,3) == char5){
            result = 'Whoohoo! You got it right.';
        }else{
            result = 'Come on...the letters aren\'t even disfigured.'; 
        }
    }
}

The next logical step would be turning this into a component but this should give you a pretty good start.

Today I discovered a neat little feature in Eclipse that allows you to compare two files and identify the differences. With multiple sandboxes, production, and developer environments I often have multiple versions of a class or Visualforce page in many different places and I lose track of minor changes. Yes, I should be using some type of real version control system but I am the only developer and so far there haven’t been any issues. I also get the vibe this is the way a lot of orgs are developing on Force.com, wild wild west style.

To compare two files in Eclipse simply hold CTRL while selecting the files, right click on one of them, Compare With, and then select Each Other. This will load a screen that allows you to easily identify the differences between the two files. This works for everything including triggers, classes, pages, objects, etc.

For the Eclipse gurus the response may be, “uh, duh”, but a lot of people developing on the Force.com platform may be new to Eclipse (myself included) and this is a great little feature.