Year: 2015

Trailhead brings more excitement with new modules and trails

Few days back, Trailhead released 1 new trail and 6 new trailhead badges. All the tutorials are awesome. Last night, I have completed few of them and I am really impressed with the contents of the tutorials. To me, Salesforce’s Trailhead is the best online training material we can have to learn Salesforce.I will explain what you will learn after completing these new modules.Apex Integration Services -While integrating Salesforce with other system, the key challenge for developers is the lack of knowledge regarding the different possibilities available to integrate force.com platform with external systems. This new module is providing the easy step by step approach to learn the options available. The exercises are really challenging and it is highly recommended to crack the exercises to make sure you understood he concept clearly.Apex REST, SOAP and Web Services are explained in really great way. Though Trailhead is telling that it will take 2 hours to complete this module, but I recommend to understand the concept very clearly and crack the exercises even if it is taking longer than 2 hours for you.Link – Apex Integration ServicesAdvance Formulas -This module is truely amazing. I think once you complete this module, understand the concept, practice the examples and crack the exercises, you can mark yourself Salesforce Formula Expert. This module is part of the new Trailhead trail – Advanced Admin. As part of this...

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Another Powerful Trailhead module – Event Monitoring

Salesforce introduces Trailhead – a fun way to learn Salesforce. It doesn’t matter whether you are Salesforce Admin or Salesforce developer, there are bunch of modules available for your based on your career path. The more modules you complete, you will get more badges and those badges will be attached to your profile. So you can see yourself going stronger and stronger day by day. That is the primary goal of using Salesforce Trailhead – Make yourselves a better Salesforce Admin or a better Salesforce Developer.To achieve your goal, Salesforce Trailhead team recently introduces three new admin modules –Admin TrailGet Ready for Dreamforce TrailEvent Monitoring moduleOut of these above three modules, the module which really looks very interesting to me is the Event Monitoring module. I immediately jumped into it and completed the same. Once completed, I have realized the power of event monitoring. Monitoring event is so important to a Salesforce Admin. In my daily day to day to work, I normally receive so many requests which now I can answer quickly with the help of event monitoring.Let me tell you what makes this module so interesting.This module consists of three sub modules as shown below –The first sub-module – Get Started with Event Monitoring –This sub-module explains the basic like what is event monitoring, what are different types of events present, use cases where event monitoring should be...

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Book Review – “Salesforce Reporting and Dashboards” by Johan Yu

Recently I was reading the book – “Salesforce Reporting and Dashboards” by Johan Yu. Johan is a very familiar face within Salesforce community. You can always reach Johan @simplysfdc, Linkedin and last but not the least his blog SimpleSFDC. I am a big fan of his blog.The book – “Salesforce Reporting and Dashboards” contains a good selection of guides for solving reporting requirements. It started very well, I mean starting from very basic and then slowly moving towards more and more complex reporting requirements. When I started reading this book, I thought what makes this book different from Salesforce’s Trailhead session on reporting – Reports & Dashboards. And here is what I feel. When Trailhead session is good to make you comfortable with Salesforce’s Reporting concept, but still there are so many complex scenarios which you need to handle in your day to day work. And this book is definitely an answer to those complex scenarios. This book will make sure that you can call yourself a “Reporting and Dashboard Expert” once you have gone through the entire book. Yes you hear it correctly – It’s “Reporting and Dashboard Expert”.I have experienced some difficulties during my career as Salesforce Administrator/Developer to provide solutions to some of my client’s reporting requirements. So when I was going through this book, I realized this book contains some effective remedies to many common problems. The...

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INTEGRATE MAPBOX WITH VISUALFORCE TO CREATE BEAUTIFUL MAP – Part III

In continuation with my previous two posts -INTEGRATE MAPBOX WITH VISUALFORCE TO CREATE BEAUTIFUL MAP – Part IINTEGRATE MAPBOX WITH VISUALFORCE TO CREATE BEAUTIFUL MAP – Part IItoday, I will explain how you can fetch geographic data from Salesforce and accordingly show them in Salesforce.To start with let me first create an object – Household where I can store geographic information. Below you can find the object details – Now the Visualforce page – Mapbox Click hereNow when you will open the page you will see the three locations plotted.In this example, I am using apex:repeat to prepare the GeoJSON data. To understand what is GeoJSON data, below is what Wikipedia stating -Once the GeoJSON data is ready, I am adding the same with featurelayer -L.mapbox.featureLayer(geojson).addTo(map);Finally, I am using the click event to show the Household name when user clicks on the points inside map. The code for that – //Show popup with information on mouse clickmyLayer.on(‘click’,function(e){     e.layer.openPopup();}); In my next post, I will explain how you can draw geographic areas inside map using Mapbox. Please provide your feedback....

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INTEGRATE MAPBOX WITH VISUALFORCE TO CREATE BEAUTIFUL MAP – Part II

In continuation to my previous post – INTEGRATE MAPBOX WITH VISUALFORCE TO CREATE BEAUTIFUL MAP – Part I, today, I will play with few attributes from Mapbox to make the map more interactive.Below are the things I will do -I will add different layers and explain how to toggle between layers.I will add scale controlI will add attribution controlI will set the location in the mapTo understand what is layer and how Mapbox works, I would request you to go through the official Mapbox tutorial @ https://www.mapbox.com/guides/how-mapbox-works/. Since from this post, we will go into deep with Mapbox, so it is better to have your basic clear in terms of how Mapbox works and what are the terminologies they use.Let’s go directly to the Visualforce Page Mapbox_2 click hereNow if you open the Visualforce page, you will see – Clicking on Layer icon, you will see -Choosing Sudipta First Map, you will see different map like -Cool!!. There are many more attributes available which you can check from Mapbox Developer resource @ https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox.js/api/v2.2.1/In my next post, I will explain how you can retrieve geographical data from Salesforce object and show them in map with Mapbox API. Sounds interesting, right!! I am working on this now, very soon I will share the information with you all.Till then, if you have any feedback, please share with me....

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INTEGRATE MAPBOX WITH VISUALFORCE TO CREATE BEAUTIFUL MAP – Part I

Maps are very powerful application to visualise information. In today’s world, map plays a very important role as many customers want to integrate maps with their applications to represent their account, contact, lead and many more information visually through map.In one of my recent project, I came across a similar requirement where I need to integrate map with Visualforce to show lead information visually in map. To implement this requirement, I have chosen Mapbox. I know you have the question in mind – Why Mapbox, why not Google Map? The reason why I have chosen Mapbox, not the Google Map – I will come to it later. But for the time being let’s keep our focus completely on Mapbox.In this post, I will explain how you can integrate Mapbox with Visualforce page. I will start with a very basic example and then dig into more and more complex ones. I believe in this way, you will also feel more comfortable with Mapbox+Visualforce integration.Note – The day I am writing this post, the version of Mapbox API is: Version 2.2.1.Step 1 – Create Mapbox accountFirst you need to create a Mapbox account. You can do that by clicking on Signup button.Step 2 – Get Default Public Token Once you have logged in, go to your profile, followed by click on Apps to get your default public token. Below is the screenshot...

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