Salesforce continues its drive to push out great platform API’s, while Winter’15 was a little lighter than usual, the List View API did catch my eye! It’s available currently in SOAP and REST flavours, sadly as yet no Apex, though I’ve seen Salesforce follow up in later releases with Apex support, so fingers crossed! This omission didn’t stop me exploring the REST variant via Visualforce and JQuery!

I’ve written a few applications that leverage List Views to provide a readily available filter criteria for various uses. One approach used the StandardSetController in Apex (via the setFilterId method) and another by reading the object definition (using Metadata API), parsing the List View definition and building my own SOQL query! This later strategy can now be replaced with the new List View API, as amongst giving you the List View definition and the records behind it, you also get hold of the SOQL query Salesforce uses as well!

The REST API version provides the following resources to call..

• /services/data/v32.0/sobjects/Account/listviews – Lists the List Views associated with the object and their Id’s (click the link to try it out in Developer Workbench!). Documentation here.
  
• /services/data/v32.0/sobjects/Account/listviews/{Id}/describe – Returns the definition of the List View and the SOQL! Documentation here.
  
• /services/data/v32.0/sobjects/Account/listviews/{Id}/results – Returns the column definitions of the List View and the records it returns. Documentation here.
  

While exploring the SOQL used by ListViews, i noticed something i had not seen before in the SOQL syntax, the USING SCOPE clause, also new to Winter’15. Recently View Accounts and My Accounts views leverage this new clause…

SELECT name, site, billingstate, phone, tolabel(type), 
  owner.alias, id, createddate, lastmodifieddate, systemmodstamp 
FROM Account 
USING SCOPE mru 
ORDER BY Name ASC NULLS FIRST, Id ASC NULLS FIRST

The above shows ‘mru’ and the following example shows ‘mine’…

SELECT name, site, billingstate, phone, tolabel(type), 
  owner.alias, id, createddate, lastmodifieddate, systemmodstamp 
FROM Account 
USING SCOPE mine 
ORDER BY Name ASC NULLS FIRST, Id ASC NULLS FIRST

The documentation is a bit weak presently on the other values, this knowledge base article, lists Everything, Mine, Queue, Delegated, MyTerritory, MyTeamTerritory or Team, but not MRU at present.

So to give these API’s a better shake down i decided to flex my JavaScript side this time, knowing that its possible to call these API’s from the Visualforce Domain without issue, its a matter of making a JavaScript call and interpreting the results. Thus Super ListView Viewer was born! With a little help from the frankly amazing JQuery plugin known as DataTable, which replicates as far as I can see the standard List View UI and then some!

This page allows you to select any object and if it has associated List View’s view them!

JQuery provices some excellent AJAX support, this code reads the SOQL query and displays it on the page…

// List View describe to take a look at the SOQL!
$.ajax({
	url : '/services/data/v32.0/sobjects/' + objectName + '/listviews/' + listViewId + '/describe', 
	headers : { 'Authorization' : 'Bearer {!$Api.Session_ID}' },
	datatype : 'json', 
	success : function(data, textStatus, jqXHR) {					
		$('#soql').text(data.query);
	}
});

This code builds a regular HTML table and then in a single line turns it into the amazing DataTable, I was quite amazed when i added this library, seriously cool!

// Call the List View API to get the results (also includes column definitions)
$.ajax({
	url : '/services/data/v32.0/sobjects/' + objectName + '/listviews/' + listViewId + '/results', 
	headers : { 'Authorization' : 'Bearer {!$Api.Session_ID}' },
	datatype : 'json', 
	success : function(data, textStatus, jqXHR) {					

		// Clear current List View info
		$('#listview').empty();

		// Create the table and add columns
		var table = $('<table></table>');
		var thead = $('<thead></thead>');
		var theadtr = $('<tr></tr>');					
		table.appendTo('#listview');					
		table.append(thead);
		thead.append(theadtr);
		$.each(data.columns, function(index, column) {
			if(!column.hidden)
				theadtr.append($('<th>' + column.label + '</th>'));
		});

		// Add the rows
		var tbody = $('<tbody></tbody>');
		table.append(tbody);
		$.each(data.records, function(rowIndex, record) {
			var tbodytr = $('<tr></tr>');					
			tbody.append(tbodytr);
			$.each(record.columns, function(colIndex, column) {
				if(!data.columns[colIndex].hidden)
					tbodytr.append($('<td>' +
					 (record.columns[colIndex].value!=null ? 
					  record.columns[colIndex].value : '') + '</td>'));
			});
		});

		// Enhance this boring old HTML table with JQuery DataTable!
		var dataTable = table.DataTable();
	    }
	});
});

You can find the full source code for this here. Of course if you had need to call this API from Apex, you can make an outbound HTTP callout, after having set up the Remote Site to allow Salesforce to call itself…

Enjoy!