Perspectives on Salesforce.com

The Force.com Workbench is a very handy thing to use when you need quick access to an org and want to see meta data or do some ad-hoc querying. It’s PHP code that you can run on your own web server and it describes itself as:

Workbench is a powerful, web-based suite of tools designed for adminstrators and developers to interact with Salesforce.com organizations via the Force.com APIs. Workbench includes robust support for the Force.com Partner, Bulk, Metadata, and Apex APIs that allows users to describe, query, manipulate, and migrate both data and metadata in Salesforce.com organizations directly in their web browser with a simple and intuitive user interface. Workbench also provides many advanced features for testing and troubleshooting the Force.com APIs, such as customizable SOAP headers, debug logs for API traffic, backward compatibility testing with previous API versions, and single sign-on integration within the Salesforce application.

I would highly recommend it.  You can download it from its Google Code site.  If you want to see it in action now, I always keep the latest version running on the arrowpointe.com domain at http://force.arrowpointe.com.  You are welcome to use it there if you’d like to.

This was also posted to the new Arrowpointe Product blog. We are moving all product specific information to that new blog and keeping this blog focused on developer related information. Please subscribe (rss, email)

Geopointe has a number of under-the-cover features (and more to come) that allow you to integrate with the application.  One such feature is the ability to use the map as a means of populating a Lookup field.

Below is a video showing this feature in action.

Enabling the Feature

The feature is enabled through the use of a Custom Button that simply passes additional parameters across in the URL.  The URL in the video example is:

/apex/geopointe__Map?

Id={!Account.Id}

&wbRecordId={!Account.Id}

&wbField=Related_Account__c

&wbLookupObject=Account

&wbButtonText={!URLENCODE("Relate This Account to " & Account.Name)}

Let’s break it down

/apex/geopointe__Map?

Id={!Account.Id}

The above is the URL from the button included with the application. It is required to sent the user to the proper page in the proper context.

&wbRecordId={!Account.Id}

wbRecordId is the ID of the record we will be writing back to.

&wbField=Related_Account__c

wbField is the field on that record we will be populating.

&wbLookupObject=Account

wbLookupObject is the object type that we will be searching for and populating the lookup field for.

&wbButtonText={!URLENCODE("Relate This Account to " & Account.Name)}

wbButtonText is optional, but can be included if you want to customize the button’s text. It is recommended to use the URLENCODE function when specifying your text, especially if you are merging in data from the system.

This was also posted to the new Arrowpointe Product blog. We are moving all product specific information to that new blog and keeping this blog focused on developer related information. Please subscribe (rss, email)

We are pleased to announce the release of our newest application, Geopointe. Geopointe integrates Force.com with Google Maps and MapQuest and is the premier Force.com geo/mapping solution providing numerous ways for end-users, administrators and developers to take advantage of geo data and maps.

Highlights of Geopointe include (but is not limited to):

• Map any Salesforce object
• Perform proximity searching (show me what’s nearby me)
• Create custom data sets (queries), both personal and public ones
• Export your results to CSV (Excel) or KML (Google Earth)
• Obtain multi-point driving directions
• The Visualizer helps create dashboard-like summaries of your data
• Automated, Scheduled Geocoding processes your data at 1000+ records per minute
• Get cleansed address data
• Contains an “API” with global Apex methods, Visualforce Components and the ability to extend the application using custom buttons.
• All existing Arrowpointe Maps customers get a free license transfer to Geopointe for the same user count and expiration date as their current license with a goal to get users off of Arrowpointe Maps and onto Geopointe.

To learn more, you can:

• Visit the AppExchange Listing
• Visit the product page on our website
• Visit the YouTube Channel
• Follow us on Twitter
• “Like” Arrowpointe on Facebook