TehNrd

UPDATE: See below.

If you don’t know already Internet Explorer 9 and Visualforce are a complete train wreck. Every single Visualforce page that performs a rerender (ajax operation) will not work with IE9. The operation appears to start and then never finishes. This has probably led to thousands of force.com developers scrambling around to find and implement a fix. The good news is fixes are pretty easy, you just need to force IE9 to run in IE8 compatibly mode. This page on developer.force.com has all of the dirty details.

So who’s is at fault for this? Microsoft’s IE9 or salesforce.com? Read more…

If you have a website knowing where your visitors are located is a powerful feature. For starters it makes your website appear to have super powers if it automatically knows where the user is from. You can do all sorts of cool stalker stuff, and by cool stalker stuff, I mean customizing site content based on the visitors location.

There are several different ways to figure out where a visitor is located, each with their pros and cons. The two main ways are IP address tracing and HTML5 geolocation. There is a great guide on developer.force.com about HTML5 geolocation that you should check out. HTML5 is all the rage these days but both methods have their advantages. In my testing HTML 5 was more accurate but it requires input from the user. The user must explicitly grant permission for the browser to find their location. Depending on the use case this may or may not work. IP address tracing on the other hand requires no input from the user and can be done completely behind the scenes unobtrusive to the user. The down side is that it is not as accurate. Another issue to consider is that some users (think your parents) will not want to click a button that gives away the location because they may think the internet is full of scams and the website will use this information to track them down and steal their identity….just sayin. So these are the two primary methods and choosing one really depends on the type of application you are building.

Read more…

UPDATE:
Before you read the update I would encourage you to read the original article below first.

This is not a bug but an expected issue with the way force.com sites pages are cached. For some reason in my crazy head I thought the only items cached on pages where the html structure, images, css, etc. I thought that even on cached pages the controller would execute on every load of the page. This is not true. The controller will only execute once when a page is not cached. Any subsequent visits while the page is cached will not cause the controller to execute. So if you are populating dynamic data on the page with Apex it will stay there for the next 10 minutes.

This becomes a major issue with pages that depend on cookies and customizing the site content per visit.

I’ve recommended that salesforce.com update their documentation with two big red bold updates:
1) Cached pages will not execute the controller on load
2) Pages that use cookies to display dynamic data should never be cached

I hope this is helpful to someone out there as I definitely learned something today.

Additional info can be found here: dev board post.

-Jason

Original Post:

I have discovered a major bug with the new cookie feature released in the Summer 10 edition of salesforce.com. Let’s get straight to the point. Cookie data is being passed across different browsers, different computers, and different users. Yes, you heard this right. Sounds unbelievable so I created a video that shows this happening. Clearly this is a major issue if you are storing session or personal information in cookies.

Before anyone rips into me for blogging about what could be a very significant security issue I have already notified salesforce.com and it is a high priority issue. I also believe it is best to get this information out to other force.com developers before they build something that depends on this functionality and this issue causes major problems for them.

At this point I highly recommend not using the new cooking feature until more information about this issue or a fix is released.

Page:

<apex:page controller="CookieBug" expires="60">
    <apex:form >
        <apex:inputText value="{!input}"/>
        <apex:commandButton value="Update Cookie" action="{!updateCookie}"/>
    </apex:form>
</apex:page>

Controller:

public class CookieBug{
 
    public String input {get; set;}
 
    public CookieBug(){
        //Autofill input based on cookie value
        Map<String,Cookie> cookies = ApexPages.currentPage().getCookies();
        if(cookies.size() > 0){
            if(cookies.get('myCookie') != null){
                input = cookies.get('myCookie').getValue();
            }
        }
    }
 
    public void updateCookie(){
        List<Cookie> cookies = new List<Cookie>();
        Cookies.add(new Cookie('myCookie',input,null,15552000,false));
        ApexPages.currentPage().setCookies(cookies);
    }
}

There is a another force.com developer meeting for Seattle coming up this Thursday. If you are in the Seattle area and want to meetup or learn more about developing on the force.com platform please stop by.

Just a friendly reminder that this Thursday, April 1st at 4:00pm will be the our monthly meeting.

The meetings as always will be held in the West Monroe Partners office located at:

1215 4^th Ave, Suite 1010
Seattle, WA 98161

This session will be an open forum so bring any questions, problems, and/or issues you have so we can discuss with the group.

If you have something cool you’d like to show off or present let me know and we can arrange for you to speak at one of the upcoming sessions.

To be honest I sort of feel bad about writing this post. I have already reviewed, ranted about, and tweaked the new salesforce.com UI, but here comes my third consecutive post related to this. I promise my next post will be about something super cool and radtaculous you can do with salesforce!

We hoped to enable the new UI in the next few weeks and like any good admin or developer I checked all of our custom Visualforce pages to make sure everything still looked and worked correctly. Everything started out so smooth. Everything was looking good. My basic, and for the most part, static Visualforce pages seem to work fine.

Read more…

My posts have been lacking lately but in the next few weeks I plan on creating some super slick demos that mix jQuery and Force.com into a delicious concoction of wonderfulness. Before I do this I’d like to go over the basics of setting up jQuery to play nice with Force.com (or salesforce.com, all the same).

If all we need is jQuery, the first thing we need to do is download it here here: http://jquery.com/.

There will be two versions, one is considered production and the other development. These actually contain the same code but the production file removes all unnecessary spaces.

This smaller version allows the script to be downloaded quicker by users viewing the page and will provide a better user experience to those with less bandwidth.
Read more…

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.

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.