Dec 22
Here are the top programming skills of 2011 according to Gild.
Unfortunately Apex did not make the cut this year. I expect it will soon enough as Salesforce is constantly making it’s development platform innovative and powerful. The year of 2011 included many new features for Apex including the Rest API, Streaming API, Native JSON, and of course Database.com.
The easiest way to schedule a recurring task to run at intervals other than daily or weekly is through the system log.
If your objective is to simply schedule an apex schedulable class to run on a daily or weekly basis, then using the Salesforce interface is best. This is done by going to Setup->Develop->Apex Classes then clicking on the ‘Schedule Apex’ button.
However if the objective is to run your class every hour, every half hour, or fifteen minutes then this quick tutorial will show you how.
Read more
Using Google Trends I was able to create an up-to-date snapshot of the current trend in Customer Relationship Management. Included is Salesforce and just a couple CRM rivals.
To create your own Google Trends chart click here.
I’ve always had a hard time finding the perfect wallpaper whenever I felt like looking at something different on my desktop/laptop screen.
Messing around a little with Google search I found it amazingly easy to update my wallpaper. Just go to Google, click on the images tab, and then advanced search. I entered ‘Mexico’ in the ‘related to all of the world’ field. Then I clicked the ‘Use my desktop size’ link which will find all of the images out there on the web that are exactly the same dimension as your desktop screen.
Once I clicked the search button I had a hard time picking just one wallpaper with thousands to choose from.
Using the Google charts API, I was able to create a cool status bar at the top of a custom visual force page. This chart was used in conjunction with values derived from a dynamic aggregate query.
The custom visual force page incorporated checkboxes, picklists and input boxes which all fed different numerical values to the multiple records created from the page. As these the numerical values were fed to the database, the aggregate query would kick the newly stored data back to the page and re-render the dynamic status bar.
The goal for the user of the page is to reach 100. As they get closer to 100, the status bar continues to grow more orange. Once the aggregate query reaches 100 the color of the bar is completely green.
This was not too difficult to accomplish as the status bar is nothing more than an html image URL.
https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chf=c,lg,0,EFEFEF,1,BBBBBB,0&
cht=bhs&chco=FF9900,FF9900&chds=0,100&chd=t1:45|100
(You can see where I had to place the aggregate query value in the URL 45|100)
All of the hard work was done by Google with the development of their dynamic chart library.
However making a dynamic URL was what I had to accomplish in order to get this to work right. Essentially I tackled this by building the URL string within the aggregate query’s Getter/Setter method within the VisualForce Pages controller, then feeding that string to a dynamic variable which is placed in the value attribute of an <apex:image> component.
After setting this component to re-render dynamically upon specific user events with ajax, this status bar worked like a charm. This also adds a cool effect to an otherwise boring visual force page.
I suspect developers throughout the SFDC cloud will soon be blogging of other cool ways to incorporate Google charts into their VisualForce development.
Remember when using a Google chart use the https://chart.googleapis.com/ domain for security.
@Alex__Briggs
@tiesto@Alex__Briggs@Alex__Briggs@Alex__Briggs
@Alyssa_Milano
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