Perspectives on Salesforce.com

The Sforce blog just posted about a tool called File Watcher, created by engineer Steve Buikhuizen of Salesforce.

Per the blog post:

When working with Salesforce data, there are many times when you need to edit records using an editor on your PC. You can do this by copying the data to a local file and then saving back to Salesforce when you’re finished. A good example of this is when you are configuring the PRM portal with your own branding and making little changes to the header, footer, etc.

But what if you need to save back to Salesforce repetitively? In this case, the cut/paste process can take up a lot of time. Now there is a better way. Use a “watcher”… These tools allow you to edit fields, documents and s-controls using any editor. When you save locally, the watcher will save the file back to Salesforce. Simple.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I will soon. Check it out at http://www.buikhuizen.com/watcher/. There is a separate watcher for Fields, Files (Documents) and S-Controls (if you use the Eclipse plug-in, then you don’t need it for S-controls)

Per Steve’s site,

These tools are open source projects, not supported by Salesforce.com.

If you build a number of s-controls that provide custom web UIs to the users, you are probably using styles for formatting the page. This is usually done within a < style > tag inside the s-control. If you have a number of s-controls that produce a similar look and feel, then you are probably copying the styles to each s-control. To change the design, you end up making changes in each s-control.

I was doing some s-control development recently and I got to thinking whether I could maintain my styles in a separate s-control and then reference that s-control like I would a CSS file. It worked! This is synonymous with maintaining a separate CSS file on your web server rather than embedding the styles within a < style > tag. This will allow you to change the styles of all of your s-controls from a single location.

An example of referencing an s-control as a CSS file is below. To reference an s-control containing your styles, simply use the the following code.

< link href="/servlet/servlet.Integration?lid={ID_OF_YOUR_CSS_S-CONTROL}” type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” >

Depending upon the amount of s-control development you do, this may or may not be necesary. But it’s a cool trick to know if you need it.

If you are developing something to upload to AppExchange for others to use, be careful going this route because the ID of the s-control you reference will be different in each Org your package gets downloaded to.

Salesforce.com just announced 2 new developer toolkits for PHP & Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails project page.
Ruby on Rails quick start.
RoR toolkit is also a gem: % gem install activesalesforce

The PHP Toolkit is located here. It is included with very helpful documentation to get you started. From what I can tell, it has to be run on PHP5 because it relies on some SOAP extensions in PHP5. Does anyone know if there is a workaround for PHP4 for this toolkit? My ISP is still on PHP4.

I came across a toolkit called ActiveSalesforce being developed as an extension to the Rails framework. Per the site,

“ActiveSalesforce is an extension to the Ruby on Rails framework that provides direct access to Salesforce.com hosted data and metadata via the ActiveRecord model layer. Standard and custom objects, standard and custom fields are all automatically surfaced as active record attributes. Something that is unique to ActiveSalesforce is that all salesforce metadata relationships are also automatically surfaced as part of the model interface!”

It looks that this is utilizing the latest 7.0 API. If anyone knows more about this, please elaborate in comments.

Open Access has created an ODBC driver for Salesforce. This allows you to use any ODBC compliant software to access the Salesforce database. You can get a free 30 day trial on their site. I have been playing around with it the past couple days to see how it worked for me in migrating data from one Salesforce environment to another. So for so good. The price seems pretty reasonable too, $99/year for a single user license.

There is also a free option to does pretty much the same thing at Sourceforge. The Forceamp tool allows you to create a Linked Server in SQL Server to your Salesforce instance(s). That tool is free, but requires SQL Server. If you don’t have SQL Server, you can get SQL Server Express free from Microsoft.