Salesforce.com has a new feature called Batch Apex. It is currently available only as a preview by special request, but is expected to be in general release later this year. One of my nonprofit clients has a very large data set and have been looking forward to the ability to add up opportunity values in a variety of ways. We used Batch Apex to create a tool for them, and it seems to be working extremely well.

In this post, I will briefly explain what Batch Apex is, and describe our use case for the feature. In a later post, I will show the tool we created and how it works.

About Batch Apex
Apex has limits. You can perform only so many queries, and process only so many results; this allows Salesforce to keep your resource usage under control. Batch Apex blows these limits out of the water by allowing you to perform a query that returns up to 5 million records, and then create a special type of apex class that processes the records 200 at a time. There are still some rules as to what you can do in a Batch Apex class, but it can be a great workaround for apex limits.

Once you write a “Batchable” Apex class that follows the proper design pattern, you can use the class to execute your query, which queues up an Apex job that executes little by little until it is complete. How fast it runs depends on factors such as complexity of your query, time of day, and the extra capacity of the Salesforce system. You can monitor your job’s progress by clicking Setup | Monitoring | Apex Jobs.

As you see, the last apex job shown was broken into 1,327 batches of 200 records – which means the query must have returned and processed over 265,000 opportunities.

Why We Used It
We use many strategies for summarizing data in Salesforce, including report totals, roll-up summary fields, and apex code in triggers. Because roll-up summaries do not support calculations of opportunity totals into contacts who have roles, we have always used triggers to keep ...

Salesforce just launched Force.com Sites and it's free for all Enterprise and Unlimited Edition subscribers!  Here's a great intro to Force.com Sites, including some possibilities for driving value to your organization leveraging it's power:

My favorite application of Sites is creating landing pages that directly update responses in Salesforce campaigns.  Some advantages of using Sites for response capture on landing pages:

 - Fewer duplicate leads

 - Cleaner response data

 - Secure, hosted, and scalable

Sites minimizes dupe leads by updating the campaign member record directly instead of creating a duplicate lead that has to be merged back to the original lead or contact.  Sites is a clean, hassle-free way to create webforms because any picklist option you add in Salesforce is immediately available on the web form.  This means if you add an option to a "Product Interest" custom field on campaign member in Salesforce, this product can immediately appear on the Sites pages your prospects and customers see,  minimizing maintenance and creating a simple way to keep data clean.  Finally, Sites is battle tested against security threats and huge traffic spikes so you can rest easy your customers will have a consistent experience.

Now we'll get into the meat: how to leverage Sites for event registration pages and set up your first page.  Using examples from the last post, you can set up workflow rules to email anyone added to a campaign.  By the end of this post, you'll know how to include smart links in those emails to drive prospects to your campaign member Sites Event pages, and automatically update responses from those pages such as this example:

http://jdk470.force.com/?id=00v3000000JIrl6AAD



To get there, we'll explore the 3 key pieces to your first site page:

1) Set up your email links to include campaign member Id's in the URL
2) Set up Force.com Sites security permissions to allow access to relevant campaign mem...

1. Firstly, your class should be marked as "Global"
2. Secondly, the logic goes to a static method of this class which is marked as "WebService"

Today's blog post comes courtesy of guest blogger Jay Thayer, our resident all-around Salesforce.com guru.

Let's say you're trying to build a common report, Cases By Origin, but with a twist -- you want to know what percent of your interactions are coming via each channel.  Well, you could build a dashboard with it and eyeball it, but that's not very satisfying -- sometimes you just want cold, hard numbers.  The good news is that there is in fact a way to do it using some new capabilities of custom summary fields.

First, start by making yourself a standard Cases By Origin report by creating a custom report.  Choose the Customer Support Reports category, and then choose the first option, Cases -- we don't need any related objects for this report.  In the next step, make it a Summary Report.

Now, here's the real trick.  The next step you'll see is the Select Columns To Total step.  We'll need this step later, but we're not ready for it just yet -- so skip it.  Do nothing here right now.

Go to the next step, Select Grouping, and set it to group by Case Origin:

Great.  Press the Next button to save your grouping settings.

Now go back to the Select Columns To Total step by using the dropdown list at the top right of the screen.  All the way at the bottom of the screen you'll see the place where you can create a new custom summary field:

Press that New button.  Because we'd jumped ahead and set the grouping, we now see a useful item here -- we can actually create a custom summary field per grouped item!

This type of field will allow us to do math using both a summary of the group items and a summary of the whole report -- that's exactly what we need to calculate our percentages.  First, at the top of the page, give the formula field a name, and set its format to Percentage.  Now let's go to the formula builder and build it up.

In order to calculate the percentage for each group, we need the record count for that group, and then we have to divid...

I’m building a system for sending out daily emails to Contacts that uses Time-Based Workflow. We’ve done some work in this area before, but now it’s really starting to come together.

In this example, Contacts are added to a Campaign that is configured with a number of planned email sends. Once the Email Series is kicked off, the Contacts will receive emails on the determined schedule. This example uses hard dates for the individual sends–we’ve also got working code that sends out emails on interval from the individual Contact’s campaign join date. That allows for open-enrollment to an Email Series.

Check out the example, I’m very happy with it. Check out the background noise–we sound like a CRM sweatshop!

There have been a few articles about changing market share for browsers and whether browsers are supported by services. Since I have the reporting tools, and as it's the end of year and so I have a full set of data for 2008, I thought I'd share some information on how salesforce.com's service has seen browser versions change. If you are looking for total share numbers, normally Jerry covers that - e.g. in June 2008 he shared his results on browser share. There are also a set of good comments in that article in response to Jerry's questions about how users use IE6 and whether they can upgrade.

We're a web application used normally by businesses - so our total numbers might not line up with somebody measuring all accesses from all browsers.

Here is the split between May 2004 and December 2008 - you can see when IE7 came out, and is slowly being pushed down to upgrade IE6. IE8 isn't statistically significant yet - it's still in beta as of January 2009.

Internet Explorer changes fairly slowly - users are either happy with their current experience, don't want to upgrade, or are not in control of their PCs. For instance, in one of the comments in Jerry's blog post above, the user says that their IT department controls the deployment over their 5000 PCs

The Safari version split shows a quicker movement from version to version - particularly version 3 which replaced all the other versions pretty quickly. I'm not sure why the number of 1.3 and 2 versions went back up - it's probably be customers trying Safari 3 on Windows - released in March 2008 - then going back to other browsers or switching to FireFox 3 because they are the cool kids.

For instance, in this idea to make Safari 3 supported - it says Safari was faster than the FireFox at the time. Then there were articles saying FF3 was faster than Safari 3 so people must have then changed again - and looking below, when Safari 3 is loosing ground, it's when the avalanche of users upgrading to FireFox 3 is happening.

• Customer
• Partner

• sObjectType: values such as "Account", "Contact", generally the name of your object.
• value: you can capture the result of user's selection by using the attribute in your Vsualforce Controller.

You probably know that a Visualforce Page can be easily converted to a PDF (if not, check out Quote2PDF), but did know Visualforce can also generate a Microsoft Excel Worksheet?

By simply modifying the ContentType attribute on the <apex:page> tag, your Visualforce code will automatically generate an Excel document. For example, the following code will create a table of Contact data for a given Account:

If an ID of a valid Account record is specified as a query parameter in the URL for the page, you will see the following table of data:

We can tell Visualforce to convert this page to an Excel doc by adding:

The next time the page is loaded, you will receive the following prompt:

Visualforce is the component-based user interface framework for the Force.com platform. The framework includes a tag-based markup language, similar to HTML. Each Visualforce tag corresponds to a coarse or fine-grained user interface component, such as a section of a page, or a field. Visualforce boasts over 60 built-in components, and a mechanism whereby developers can create their own components.

Visualforce uses the traditional model-view-controller (MVC) paradigm, with the option to use auto-generated controllers for database objects, providing simple and tight integration with the database. You can write your own controllers, or extensions to controllers, using Apex Code. Visualforce also provides AJAX components, and embeds the formula expression language for action, data and component binding interaction.

This article introduces Visualforce. It illustrates the major areas of functionality, provides an example of the MVC paradigm in action, shows how to include database integration, and demonstrates how to create your own components.

A developer creates Visualforce pages by composing components, HTML and optional styling elements on the Force.com platform. Each page is then accessible by a unique URL. When someone accesses a page, the server renders the page.

As the figure illustrates, pages are constructed on the server and depending on the logic behind the page may interact with the database, invoke external web service calls or both before returning the view to the client (browser). In fact:

• Visualforce pages can react differently to different client browsers such as those on a mobile or touch screen device
• Everything runs on the server, so no additional client-side callbacks are needed to render a complete view
• Optional server-side call outs can be made to any web service

Let's see how this works in a little more detail.

This section provides a quick overview of a simple Visualforce page, followed by some...

I downloaded Balsamiq’s Mockup tool last week and have played with it a bit. I’m pretty impressed as it smartly hits a sweet spot between quick and dirty and presentation ready.

Mockups is an Air app for doing interface designs very quickly. There is a library of common interface elements: web browser chrome, input field, google map, tabs, etc. You simply drag these onto your mockup and go. Most have some simple configuration: title bar of the browser chrome, value showing in the drop down, etc.

Yesterday a user of mine asked for a specific feature in Salesforce.com. I used Mockups to draw it for my post, and for my Salesforce.com Idea post. I think the image speaks volumes in support of the idea.

I’ve tried lots of other mockup tools: Visio, Denim, Illustrator, Pencil, and many more that are now defunct. I like Balsamiq’s product a lot and I think you’ll see it in my posts for the foreseeable future.

I only wish someone would build some Salesforce.com widgets (like object lookups) and a Trac integration, I’d be in heaven!