Written by Eoin on 25 Apr 2008 — Tagged with: Apex, Script, Structure, Visualforce

Hi Everyone! Sorry for the long absence from posting.

Where have I been I hear you ask, as the title of the post suggests, I’ve been lost in the “The World of Apex”, as I like to call it.

What is Apex? Apex is salesforce.com’s on demand programming language, it’s similar to Java in its syntax but differs in some important ways; you can get all the info on the force.com developer site.

For an administrator like me Apex is one of the most useful technologies that Salesforce have produced, it allows so much more flexibility when building customization onto your existing applications and building new custom applications.

Before I go into much more detail I want to get one thing clear, I am by no means a developer, I’ve done some small amounts of programming here and there, but nothing substantial, I don’t even hold a college degree, so if I can program Apex so can you!

When I started looking into Apex I was amazed at how powerful it was but found out very quickly how much hassle it can also cause. Salesforce have built what they call governor limits into Apex, which is basically a set of in built limits which you need to work within when developing; you can find more information about it here. The reason for this is that instead of running on your machine, Apex runs completely on the salesforce.com servers and they simply can’t afford that someone would write a program that could hog all the resources on their servers and cause the whole system to crumble.

Over the next few posts (I say posts because I really don’t know how often I’m going to get posting) I’m going to go through some basic concepts of Apex and provide examples of Apex triggers and classes I’ve written.

If you’ve visited the link above to the developer site you’ll also have seen information on that page regarding Visualforce. Visualforce is a HTML like markup language that allows you to restructure and build custom pages and User Interfaces for your salesforce.com implementation, currently its still in a developer preview and isn’t available to your live systems so I won’t be delving into that one just yet.

Well that’s the introductions out of the way, next post: “Getting Started”..

Written by Alessandro on 2 Apr 2007 — Tagged with: Fields, IDs, Structure, URLs

Often people ask me how to get fields IDs in order to build their custom links. I thought it would have been helpful to write a post about this. Let’s see how to get a field ID for custom and standard fields.

Custom Fields

In order to get the ID of a custom field proceed this way:

• Click on Setup, then on Customize, select the Object you desire (e.g.: Leads) and click on Fields;
• Click on the name of the custom field you previously created
• Look at your browser’s address bar, you’ll see something like:
  https://emea.salesforce.com/00N20000000thpj
• The 15 digit code that appears immediately after https://emea.salesforce.com/ is the ID of that custom field; in this case the ID of the custom field I selected is 00N20000000thpj

Easy enough, isnt’t it

Standard Fields

Salesforce.com provides a list of the field’s name for its standard fields, which can be found attached to the solution “How do I create custom links?” and that I decided to paste here as a quick reference:

Questions?

Written by Alessandro on 11 Jan 2007 — Tagged with: Structure, URLs

UPDATE: Public apologies to Mike Schinkel, this post was inspired by Mike’s “URL Structure“. I decided to write a similar post to include the full list of known instances, mine wasn’t certainly a way to get credit for something you wrote first Mike! Sorry!

Finally found the structure to delete a record in SF, adding it below. Eoin

Here’s a quick introduction to understand the structure of all the URLs in Salesforce:

Instances

Salesforce’s organizations reside on multiple instances, to find out what instance you’re on, once you logged into Salesforce, have a look at the address bar; you’ll notice the URL starts with something like:

ssl – North America #0 (aka na0)
na1 – North America #1
na2 – North America #2
na3 – North America #3
na4 – North America #4
na5 – North America #5
emea – Europe, Middle East, Africa
ap – Asia, Pacific
tapp0 – Sandbox #0
tapp1 – Sandbox #1

https://xyz.salesforce.com

where xyz is the name of the instance your organization is on.

Objects’ specific URLs

Every Salesforce’s object has it’s specific URL, here are listed the links to the standard objects:

Basic action URLs

Use the following URLs to perform the listed operations on a specific object. Note this is fundamental to then understand how to create internal custom links.

Object’s overview page
https://[instance].salesforce.com/[object]/o
ie: https://emea.salesforce.com/500/o

Create a new record
https://[instance].salesforce.com/[object]/e?retURL=/[object_code]/o
ie: https://emea.salesforce.com/500/e?retURL=/500/o

Edit a record
https://[instance].salesforce.com/[object]/[recordID]/e?retURL=[recordID]
ie: https://emea.salesforce.com/50020000000chRD/e?retURL=/50020000000chRD

Clone a record
https://[instance].salesforce.com/[object]/[recordID]/e?retURL=[recordID]&clone=1

Delete a record
https://[instance].salesforce.com/setup/own/deleteredirect.jsp?delID=[recordID]

where:

• [instance] is the instance’s name your organization resides on;
• [object] is the object’s code;
• [recordID] is the ID of the record itself.