A blog from the Platform Engineering team.

Spring ’12 is Here and What Comes with it? Visual Workflow!

By Varadarajan Rajaram | Published: February 7, 2012

If you haven’t already read the release notes for Spring ’12, let me be the first to tell you that Visual Workflow and the new Cloud Flow Designer will be included in EE and UE Editions! You no longer need to purchase the additional Flow user license. This is great news indeed, but what’s better is the list of enhancements that also come along with the Spring ’12 release.

Cloud Flow Designer is GA

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The Cloud Flow Designer is now a GA product with a huge list of features and enhancements.

Routing

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Cascade Insert with External Id Fields

By Hallie Parry | Published: February 1, 2012

The problem

If you’re like me, you’ve got a whole bunch of external data in the form of Grandparent -> Parent -> Child. Those are all one-to-many relationships. You’d like to import this data into Salesforce — into three corresponding custom objects, in fact. You’d like to represent those relationships with with some master-detail fields, and you’d really like to be economical with your insert statements because you live in mortal terror of governor limits.

The useless solution

The naive method of accomplishing this is about as attractive as

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Announcing Java Spring development kit for Force.com and Database.com

By Jesper Joergensen | Published: August 26, 2011

We’re happy to announce the availability of the Database.com SDK for Java and Spring from salesforce.com. This delivers VMforce, the open Java cloud initiative announced by salesforce.com and VMware last year. Java and Spring developers can now build applications for Force.com and Database.com and deploy to Heroku, Cloudfoundry.com or any other platform that supports Java.

The Spring framework is a key ingredient in cloud portability. Applications can be configured once and deployed to many different targets without changing anything. This is useful for managing environments across development, staging and production and for moving applications between different clouds.

The Database.com… Continue reading

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CSRF and apex:page

By Tom Maher | Published: June 9, 2011

How not to CSRF yourself on Force.com. Now with 20% more llamas. Continue reading

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Bulk API Queries

By Ryan Brainard | Published: March 21, 2011

The Spring '11 release introduced bulk queries as a pilot* feature of the Force.com Bulk API 21.0. With this feature, you can submit SOQL queries to Salesforce, run them asynchronously, and then download all your results once the query is completed. This is a huge win for any developers working with long-running queries or queries with large result sets. You no longer have to leave a connection open while the query is being executed or call queryMore() a zillion times to retrieve the full result set! You can even monitor the progress of the query in Salesforce and download the… Continue reading

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Maximize Installs & Minimize Apex Test Failures

By john-kucera | Published: March 14, 2011

It’s a scenario many of us have been through.  You’ve slaved over your application for months, written impeccable tests, and verified everything works, but customers still can’t install the application because of test failures resulting from their validation rules and triggers preventing your test data from being created.  Even worse, you get a 1 star rating as they vent their frustrations.

For Chatter Unfollow Rules v2.0, I came up with a different approach to avoid this issue.  The app uses dynamic SOQL to let you pick which object, field, and criteria, similar to workflow rules, and then unfollows

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Source Code Scanning

By Robert Fly | Published: January 31, 2011

A year back we began supporting source code analysis on Force.com through http://security.force.com/sourcescanner.  We've had great success with it, but the number one piece of feedback we've gotten from all of you was why there wasn't any integration with the Force.com IDE.

Checkmarx, the company we partnered with to provide Force.com source scanning, has stepped up and made an offering available to all of you.  For 90 days, for the first 1000 developers, they'll give away a free version of an Eclipse plugin that can scan all Force.com code (under 100k LoC).  The great thing about this is that you get… Continue reading

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What I Love About Heroku

By Parker Harris | Published: December 8, 2010

I am thrilled to be writing here about Heroku, a company we have signed a definitive agreement to acquire by January 31st. 

When I first met Orion Henry, James Lindenbaum and Adam Wiggins, co-founders of Heroku, I saw in them and in their language a reflection of myself, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez when we started salesforce.com. They talked about simplicity and iteration. Of following standards rather than defining them. Of sharp tools built by small, agile teams. And that producing more code was actually a bad thing. Most of all I saw the potential of their ideas, their technology and… Continue reading

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See You At Dreamforce!

By Robert Fly | Published: December 3, 2010

On top of the several security talks that we'll have at Dreamforce, we'll also have a security booth in the dev zone.

Here's what we'll have:

  • Code Consultations
  • Security Quiz (we'll have another prize ;-)
  • General Q&A
  • Demo and a free trial of a new tool which will help native app security/quality

For those interested, sign up for code consultations in the Dreamforce app.  See you there!

 -Robert… Continue reading

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And the winner is…

By Robert Fly | Published: December 2, 2010

I was really happy about the number of folks who took the quiz and the interest in it.  More-so, I was completely surprised that we had someone actually score 100% on the quiz given its difficulty.  I was even more blown away when I woke up on 12/1 and saw that three folks had scored 100%!

To everyone, congrats and I hope it was useful.  Without further ado, here are your winners:

  1. Shamil Arsunukayev – Comity Designs
  2. Rajendra Singh Ogra – Metacube Software
  3. Arvind Chaudhary – freelancing

 

Shamil won the RC Helicopter and Rajendra/Arvind will receive… Continue reading

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