A blog by the Platform Documentation and User Assistance team.

New and Updated Developer Documentation for Spring ’12

By Dan Yu | Published: February 16, 2012

For your reading pleasure, we’ve updated the developer documentation on developer.salesforce.com and database.com. It reflects the new Spring ’12 Salesforce release (API version 24.0). In addition, there are some new docs you might want to check out.

  • The Live Agent Developer’s Guide is now available. This guide describes how to customize Live Agent according to your company’s needs.
  • The Cloud Flow Designer Workbook is now available. This workbook gives you a quick introduction to designing flows. You’ll become familiar with some of the basic elements of the Cloud Flow Designer, including creating and looking up records, configuring decisions
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REST API Cheat Sheet: It’s Only Cheating if You’re Taking a Test

By Dianne Siebold | Published: February 10, 2012

For all you Force.com REST developers, we have added the REST API Cheat Sheet to our library of cheat sheets. In addition to reference info, it also has quite a few examples of how you can use REST API to update a field, delete a record, search, and so on.

Click here to see all the other cheat sheets.

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Watch and Learn: New Videos for Spring ’12

By Michelle Chapman-Thurber | Published: February 2, 2012
Sending Mass Email

If you learn better by watching than by reading, check out some of our great new videos for Spring ’12!  There are so many, we had to break them up into two posts, so stay tuned for more videos coming soon.

Sending Mass Email
This demo for end users shows you how to leverage the mass email tool in Salesforce, so you can quickly contact your customers and keep track of the emails within Salesforce.

Need Help Logging In?
Forgot your Salesforce password? You can reset it yourself! Watch this quick video to see how.

Chatter Groups… Continue reading

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Spring ’12 – Top 10 Developer Features

By Dianne Siebold | Published: January 18, 2012

The Spring ’12 release is here, and if you’re a developer, you’re probably asking “what’s in it for me?” The answer is, plenty. Here, in no particular order, is my take on the top 10 features for developers.

  1. SOQL OFFSET (Developer Preview) – This is a new clause on the SOQL SELECT statement that lets you “skip” rows in the returned record set. You can use OFFSET together with LIMIT to break up returned data into blocks of records. Note that OFFSET is applied to the result set returned at the time of the query. There’s no server-side
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Spring ’12 Preview Release Notes – It may be cold and blustery outside, but Spring is coming!

By Michelle Chapman-Thurber | Published: January 6, 2012

Oh boy, they’re here!  The Salesforce.com Spring ’12 Preview Release Notes!

The Documentation team has been feverishly working on these over the past several weeks, and we think you’ll be pretty excited about the features coming up.  We certainly are!

One of the first things you may notice when you open the Spring ’12 Preview Release Notes is the new Release Notes Change Log. We heard your frustration in Winter ’12 about not knowing what had changed from one version of the release notes to the next. Now, right up front after the “About the Release Notes” section… Continue reading

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Using Calculation Fields in Summary SOQL Queries

By Michael Alderete | Published: December 22, 2011
Closed Won custom calculation field: IF(ISPICKVAL(StageName,"Closed Won"), 1, 0)

In my last post I described a technique for merging the results of multiple summary SOQL queries into a single data structure to hold all of the results. Once the results are merged, you can use them for Visualforce charting (which requires this format), reporting, and so on.

But the code used multiple SOQL queries, and the Apex loop to merge multiple results was fairly complicated, and would be even more so with additional queries to merge in. It left a bit of a “there must be an easier way” taste in my mouth, and maybe yours too… Continue reading

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Data Loader Source Now on GitHub

By Dianne Siebold | Published: December 14, 2011

As you may or may not know, the source code for Data Loader has always been available on SourceForge. Starting with version 22.0, the Data Loader source is now housed on GitHub.

GitHub provides a collaborative environment where you can follow code projects, see who branched a project, and follow other GitHub users to see what they’re working on.

Of course, you can still download the latest compiled Windows version of Data Loader by going to Your Name > Setup > Data Management > Data Loader (or just Data Management > Data Loader, in Database.com)… Continue reading

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Winter ’12 Release Notes – Updates for the Weeks of October 31st and November 7th

By Michelle Chapman-Thurber | Published: November 10, 2011

Hope you’ve all successfully recovered from Hallowe’en!  Here are the major updates to the Winter ’12 release notes in the last two weeks:

Customers in Private Chatter Groups – Delayed Release to Some Instances

The following instances had their deployment dates changed for this feature.  These are the updated dates:

NA0, NA2, NA3, NA4—Wednesday, November 9, 2011
AP0, AP1, EU0, EU1, NA5, NA10, NA11, NA12—Thursday, November 10, 2011

Free Chatter Data Storage

Starting in Winter ‘12, Chatter feed posts, tracked changes, and comments no longer count toward your data storage. However, any files and photos… Continue reading

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Know Your Limits

By Katia Hage | Published: November 9, 2011

The Salesforce Limits Quick Reference Guide is your one-stop shop for limits in the Salesforce app and the Force.com platform. It was first published in Spring ’11 and is updated every release when new limits get added.

You’ll notice that the guide has two main sections.

  • The Salesforce Application Limits section contains limits that pertain to end-user features and products in the Salesforce app. You can find limits that vary by edition by quickly scanning the Salesforce Features and Editions Limits table. Or inspect a section that groups related limits like the Analytics Limits or the Sites
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A Real Controller for Visualforce Charting

By Michael Alderete | Published: November 8, 2011
A combined bar and line chart

In my last post, A Quick Look at Visualforce Charting, I gave you a look at an interesting chart, but I cheated by using a stub controller to provide hard-coded data. Today I’m going to fill in that controller, and show a more realistic method for assembling the data to feed to the chart itself. This article is about the Apex behind the chart, rather than any new charting features. I hope you’ll find some useful techniques, for charting or any Visualforce page.

Note: Sandeep Bahnot recently posted an article with some code from the Winter ’12 webinar, Visualforce… Continue reading

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