Andy in the Cloud

From BBC Basic to Force.com and beyond…


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Visual Flow with List View and Related List Buttons

Last years blog Clicks not Code with Visual Flow Custom Buttons has continued to be quite well received, so i thought i would explore what more could be done and address a few questions that have come up since. This blog does make some assumptions that you are already familiar with the approach from my previous blog.

This time i want to focus on using Visual Flows with list Custom Buttons, such buttons can be placed on List View layouts and Related List sections on Detail layouts. Salesforce also provides a means for the user to select specific records to process. These buttons apply to both Salesforce Classic and Salesforce Lighting Experience.

AccountFlowListView

As before we are keeping in the spirit of Clicks not Code, well with a little bit of reusable Visualforce code. But don’t worry you can easily copy and paste to adapt with a few changes. Critically with this approach you don’t need to resort to JavaScript based Custom Buttons, which will no longer be supported in Lighting Experience.

Handling Record Lists from Custom Buttons

First things first, ensure you have created a SObjectCollection variable in your Flow and ensured its designated as Input. For this blog we are simply going to display a step in the UI for each selected record. Using the Loop and Screen elements. One thing to keep track of is the fields your referencing within the Flow, in this case i’m using Account Name and Annual Amount.

SelectedAccountsFlow

List View Custom Button Example

Lets get started with a Custom Button on the Account List View. When adding a List Custom Button you have two choices, do you want the user to be able to select records or not? If not, then your button will pass all the records in the List View (currently limited to 2000).

So if when creating your Custom Button you plan to select the Display Checkboxes (for Multi-Record Selection) option. Then create the following Visualforce page, changing the object name and list of fields accordingly. This will ensure selected records are passed to your Flow.

<apex:page standardController="Account" tabStyle="Account" recordSetVar="AllAccounts" >
    <!-- Add below each field you reference in your Flow -->    
    <apex:repeat value="{!AllAccounts}" var="row" rendered="false">
        {!row.Name}
        {!row.AnnualRevenue}
    </apex:repeat>
    <!-- Runs your Flow -->    
    <flow:interview name="SelectedAccounts" 
          finishLocation="{!URLFOR($Action.Account.Tab, $ObjectType.Account)}">
        <apex:param name="SelectedRows" value="{!Selected}"/>
    </flow:interview>
</apex:page>

IMPLEMENTATION NOTE: If you want to avoid bothering with changes between lines 3-6, simply re-query the records in the Flow using the Fast Lookup element. Thought it’s less efficient this way since your not leveraging the query made by Visualforce.

If you don’t want the ability for the users to select records and want all records, the main difference to the above is a change to the line 10, passing in the AllAccounts binding.

    <!-- Runs your Flow -->    
    <flow:interview name="SelectedAccounts" 
          finishLocation="{!URLFOR($Action.Account.Tab, $ObjectType.Account)}">
        <apex:param name="SelectedRows" value="{!AllAccounts}"/>
    </flow:interview>

Don’t forget to add your button to the List View layout, select some records and give it a try!

SelectedAccountRow

Related List Custom Button Example

In this case the Visualforce page is much the same, accept that of course your placing the associated button on the Layout of the parent object by editing the applicable related list section. The following example shows a button on the Opportunities related list on the Account object.

<apex:page standardController="Opportunity" tabStyle="Opportunity" recordSetVar="AllOpportunities">
    <!-- Add below each field you reference in your Flow -->
    <apex:repeat value="{!AllOpportunities}" var="row" rendered="false">
        {!row.Name}
        {!row.Amount}
    </apex:repeat>
    <!-- Runs your Flow -->
    <flow:interview name="SelectedOpportunities" 
          finishLocation="{!$CurrentPage.parameters.retURL}">
        <apex:param name="SelectedRows" value="{!Selected}"/>
    </flow:interview>    
</apex:page>

RelatedListFlowButton

IMPLEMENTATION NOTE: Note that the above Visualforce page code uses a URL parameter retURL, which is not available in Lighting Experience. It still works, but leaves the user on the finish page.

Summary

For more information on passing values to Flows using Visualforce check out the docs here. With the exception of the retURL hack above, i’m pleased to see support in Classic and Lighting Experience. Though the later, has yet to obtain support for providing the record selection support, so only the all records use case is available.

At present Visual Flow styling does not quite look at home either in Lightning Experience, which made me wonder about trying SLDS styling with Flow’s CSS customisation abilities (i will let everyone known how successful this is!)…

AccountFlowListViewLEX

FlowInLEX

Finally both these approaches will also work equally well with Automation Flows (aka Headless Flows), just in case, as with the example in my earlier blog you just want to do some kind of calculations without prompting the user.


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Pillars of Enterprise Development

During 2014 i authored my first full book, entitled Force.com Enterprise Development, it was a long process taking over 8 months, so certainly if your considering such a thing yourself be prepared for a big investment! The opening paragraph is as follows…

2994EN_ Salesforce1 Platform Enterprise Architecture_0Enterprise organisations have complex processes and integration requirements that typically span multiple locations around the world. They seek out the best in class applications that support their needs today and in the future. The ability to adapt an application to their practices, terminology, and integrations with other existing applications or processes is key to them. They invest as much in your application as they do in you as the vendor capable of delivering an application strategy that will grow with them.

Motivation and background to the book

The Salesforce community is diverse, consisting of package developers, in house developers and consultants, each with varying degrees of technical knowledge. While Salesforce documentation can be found to address the needs of each of these types of developers, it is often more of a reference style in nature and can be hard to contextualise. Meaning a clear path to an architecture for enterprise developers to refer can be hard to find and peace together.

I wanted the book to act as flow for all that a developer needs to get the best out of the platform while laying down a strong foundation of development practices and patterns, to allow their application to scale and evolve with the same rapid pace of the platform itself (see some examples of where this has been achieved below).  Existing enterprise Java or .Net developers considering the platform will find some well known enterprise patterns. There has been a significant increase in architecture and best practice questions over the last 2-3 years on the Salesforce forums such as StackExchange and Salesforce Community Answers.

Pillars of Enterprise Development

PillarsWhen planning the outline for the book and thinking about Enterprise development on the platform in general, i had three core beliefs in mind that i wanted to seed within the book.

  • Embrace the whole Platform, The first tenant of the Force.com platform is to combine the power of the declarative programming style with the traditional source code based programming style. Doing so ensures not only the developer is as effective as possible, focusing on coding only where needed, but also the resulting application has strong ‘native’ feel to it, giving its end users access to the platforms rich set of customization, configuration and integration capabilities that enterprise customers demand. I wanted the reader to have a key awareness of the benefits of being ‘native’ on the platform, to keep it in mind always and realize the benefits this combined development approach can be bring to end users.

  • Build Strong Foundations, Enterprise applications are expected to serve their customers for many years to come, as customers build solutions and processes around them, which become a critical part of their businesses. As applications grow in complexity the code base especially needs to not buckle under the pressure, be that the addition features or general maintenance of existing features, made by existing or new developer resources. A strong foundation will ensure that the code base endures this type of change with minimal impact on the rest of the system and the users. I wanted the reader to get a strong sense of the meaning of Separation of Concerns and how it applies to enterprise applications built on the Force.com platform.

    • Lightning Experience was obviously not around at the time and Lightning Components only in Pilot, now they are both GA, but are Services still as applicable to Lighting controllers? You bet!

  • Your Application as Platform, Enterprise customers demand high levels of integration, customization and integration from your application, as they either repurpose or consume the application within a larger business process or integration. So i wanted the reader to gain an understanding of the Force.com platform features they can leverage to ensure that these aspects are considered from an architecture perspective and thus baked into each new application function, such that the resulting application becomes in essence a part of the platform itself.

    • Lightning Process Builder was but a gleam in someones eye a year ago, but can Services be exposed via Invocable Methods to this tool? You bet!

I’m so pleased and proud to see some great reviews of the book and also some great feedback on Twitter. If your interested in taking a deeper look check out the sidebar of my blog, you can get your hands on it both digitally and in good old paper back! Enjoy!


13 Comments

Where to place Validation code in an Apex Trigger?

Quite often when i answer questions on Salesforce StackExchange they prompt me to consider future blog posts. This question has been sat on my blog list for a while and i’m finally going to tackle the ‘performing validation in the after‘ comment in this short blog post, so here goes!

Salesforce offers Apex developers two phases within an Apex Trigger, before and after. Most examples i see tend to perform validation code in the before phase of the trigger, even the Salesforce examples show this. However there can be implications with this, that is not at first that obvious. Lets look at an example, first here is my object…

Screen Shot 2015-04-19 at 09.31.05

Now the Apex Trigger doing some validation…

trigger LifeTheUniverseAndEverythingTrigger1 on LifeTheUniverseAndEverything__c
   (before insert) {

	// Make sure if there is an answer given its always 42!
	for(LifeTheUniverseAndEverything__c record : Trigger.new) {
		if(record.Answer__c!=null && record.Answer__c != 42) {
			record.Answer__c.addError('Answer is not 42!');
		}
	}
}

The following test method asserts that a valid value has been written to the database. In reality you would also have tests that assert invalid values are rejected, though the test method below will suffice for this blog.

	@IsTest
	private static void testValidSucceeds() {

		// Insert a valid answer
		LifeTheUniverseAndEverything__c
			lifeTheUniverseAndEverything = new LifeTheUniverseAndEverything__c();
		lifeTheUniverseAndEverything.Answer__c = 42;
		insert lifeTheUniverseAndEverything;

		// Is the answer still the same, surely nobody could have changed it right?
		System.assertEquals(42,
			[select Answer__c
			   from LifeTheUniverseAndEverything__c
			   where Id = :lifeTheUniverseAndEverything.Id][0].Answer__c);
	}

This all works perfectly so far!

Screen Shot 2015-04-19 at 10.46.51

What harm can a second Apex Trigger do?

Once developed Apex Triggers are either deployed into a Production org or packaged within an AppExchange package which is then installed. In the later case such Apex Triggers cannot be changed. The consideration being raised here arises if a second Apex Trigger is created on the object. There can be a few reasons for this, especially if the existing Apex Trigger is managed and cannot be modified or a developer simply chooses to add another Apex Trigger.

So what harm can a second Apex Trigger on the same object really cause? Well, like the first Apex Trigger it has the ability to change field values as well as validate them. As per the additional considerations at the bottom of the Salesforce trigger invocation documentation, Apex Triggers are not guaranteed to fire in any order. So what would happen if we add a second trigger like the one below which attempts to modify the answer to an invalid value?

trigger LifeTheUniverseAndEverythingTrigger2 on LifeTheUniverseAndEverything__c
  (before insert) {

	// I insist that the answer is actually 43!
	for(LifeTheUniverseAndEverything__c record : Trigger.new) {
		record.Answer__c = 43;
	}
}

At time of writing in my org, it appears that this new trigger (despite its name) is actually being run by the platform before my first validation trigger. Thus since the validation code gets executed after this new trigger changes the value we can see the validation is still catching it. So while thats technically not what this test method was testing, it shows for the purposes of this blog that the validation is still working, phew!

Screen Shot 2015-04-19 at 10.50.12

Apex Trigger execution order matters…

So while all seems well up until this point,  remember that we cannot guarantee that Salesforce will always run our validation trigger last. What if ours validation trigger ran first? Since we cannot determine the order of invocation of triggers, what we can do to illustrate the effects of this is simply switch the code in the two examples triggers like this so.

trigger LifeTheUniverseAndEverythingTrigger2 on LifeTheUniverseAndEverything__c
  (before insert) {

  	// Make if there is an answer given its always 42!
	for(LifeTheUniverseAndEverything__c record : Trigger.new) {
		if(record.Answer__c!=null && record.Answer__c != 42) {
			record.Answer__c.addError('Answer is not 42!');
		}
	}
}

trigger LifeTheUniverseAndEverythingTrigger1 on LifeTheUniverseAndEverything__c
  (before insert, before update) {

	// I insist that the answer is actually 43!
	for(LifeTheUniverseAndEverything__c record : Trigger.new) {
		record.Answer__c = 43;
	}
}

Having effectively emulated the platform running the two triggers in a different order, validation trigger first, then the field modify trigger second. Our test asserts are now showing the validation logic in this scenario failed to do its job and invalid data reached the database, not good!

Screen Shot 2015-04-19 at 10.53.51

So whats the solution to making my triggers bullet proof?

So what is the solution to avoiding this, well its pretty simple really, move your logic into the after phase. Even though the triggers may still fire in different orders, one thing is certain. Nothing and i mean nothing, can change in the after phase of a trigger execution, meaning you can reliably check the field values without fear of them changing later!

trigger LifeTheUniverseAndEverythingTrigger2 on LifeTheUniverseAndEverything__c
  (after insert) {

  	// Make if there is an answer given its always 42!
	for(LifeTheUniverseAndEverything__c record : Trigger.new) {
		if(record.Answer__c!=null && record.Answer__c != 42) {
			record.Answer__c.addError('Answer is not 42!');
		}
	}
}

Thus with this change in place, even though the second trigger fires afterwards and attempts to change the value an inserted to 43, the first trigger validation still prevents records being inserted to the database, success!

Screen Shot 2015-04-19 at 10.50.12

Summary

This approach is actually referenced in a few Trigger frameworks such as Tony Scott’s ‘Trigger Pattern for Tidy, Streamlined, Bulkified Triggers‘ and the Apex Enterprise Patterns Domain pattern.

One downside here is that for error scenarios the record is executing potentially much more platform features (for workflow and other processes) before your validation eventually stops proceedings and asks for the platform to roll everything back. That said, error scenarios, once users learn your system are hopefully less frequent use cases.

So if you feel scenario described above is likely to occur (particularly if your developing a managed package where its likely subscriber developers will add triggers), you should seriously consider leveraging the after phase of triggers for validation. Note this also applies with the update and delete events in triggers.

 


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Unit Testing, Apex Enterprise Patterns and ApexMocks – Part 2

In Part 1 of this blog series i introduced a new means of applying true unit testing to Apex code leveraging the Apex Enterprise Patterns. Covering the differences between true unit testing vs integration testing and how the lines can get a little blurred when writing Apex test methods.

If your following along you should be all set to start writing true unit tests against your controller, service and domain classes. Leveraging the inbuilt dependency injection framework provided by the Application class introduced in the last blog. By injecting mock implementations of service, domain, selector and unit of work classes accordingly.

What are Mock classes and why do i need them?

Depending on the type of class your unit testing you’ll need to mock different dependencies so that you don’t have to worry about the data setup of those classes while your busy putting your hard work in to testing your specific class.

Unit Testing

In object-oriented programming, mock objects are simulated objects that mimic the behavior of real objects in controlled ways. A programmer typically creates a mock object to test the behavior of some other object, in much the same way that a car designer uses a crash test dummy to simulate the dynamic behavior of a human in vehicle impacts. Wikipedia.

In this blog we are going to focus on an example unit test method for a Service, which requires that we mock the unit of work, selector and domain classes it depends on (unit tests for these classes will of course be written as well). Lets take a look first at the overall test method then break it down bit by bit. The following test method makes no SOQL queries or DML to accomplish its goal of testing the service layer method.

	@IsTest
	private static void callingServiceShouldCallSelectorApplyDiscountInDomainAndCommit()
	{
		// Create mocks
		fflib_ApexMocks mocks = new fflib_ApexMocks();
		fflib_ISObjectUnitOfWork uowMock = new fflib_SObjectMocks.SObjectUnitOfWork(mocks);
		IOpportunities domainMock = new Mocks.Opportunities(mocks);
		IOpportunitiesSelector selectorMock = new Mocks.OpportunitiesSelector(mocks);

		// Given
		mocks.startStubbing();
		List<Opportunity> testOppsList = new List<Opportunity> {
			new Opportunity(
				Id = fflib_IDGenerator.generate(Opportunity.SObjectType),
				Name = 'Test Opportunity',
				StageName = 'Open',
				Amount = 1000,
				CloseDate = System.today()) };
		Set<Id> testOppsSet = new Map<Id, Opportunity>(testOppsList).keySet();
		mocks.when(domainMock.sObjectType()).thenReturn(Opportunity.SObjectType);
		mocks.when(selectorMock.sObjectType()).thenReturn(Opportunity.SObjectType);
		mocks.when(selectorMock.selectByIdWithProducts(testOppsSet)).thenReturn(testOppsList);
		mocks.stopStubbing();
		Decimal discountPercent = 10;
		Application.UnitOfWork.setMock(uowMock);
		Application.Domain.setMock(domainMock);
		Application.Selector.setMock(selectorMock);

		// When
		OpportunitiesService.applyDiscounts(testOppsSet, discountPercent);

		// Then
		((IOpportunitiesSelector)
			mocks.verify(selectorMock)).selectByIdWithProducts(testOppsSet);
		((IOpportunities)
			mocks.verify(domainMock)).applyDiscount(discountPercent, uowMock);
		((fflib_ISObjectUnitOfWork)
			mocks.verify(uowMock, 1)).commitWork();
	}

First of all, you’ll notice the test method name is a little longer than you might be used to, also the general layout of the test splits code into Given, When and Then blocks. These conventions help add some documentation, readability and consistency to test methods, as well as helping you focus on what it is your testing and assuming to happen. The convention is one defined by Martin Fowler, you can read more about GivenWhenThen here. The test method name itself, stems from a desire to express the behaviour the test is confirming.

Generating and using Mock Classes

UPDATE: Since the Apex Stub API was released you do not need this, see here!

The Java based Mockito framework leverages the Java runtimes capability to dynamically create mock implementations. However the Apex runtime does not have any support for this. Instead ApexMocks uses source code generation to generate the mock classes it requires based on the interfaces you defined in my earlier post.

The patterns library also comes with its own mock implementation of the Unit of Work for you to use, as well as some base mock classes for your selectors and domain mocks (made know to the tool below). The following code at the top of the test method creates the necessary mock instances that will be configured and injected into the execution.

// Create mocks
fflib_ApexMocks mocks = new fflib_ApexMocks();
fflib_ISObjectUnitOfWork uowMock = new fflib_SObjectMocks.SObjectUnitOfWork(mocks);
IOpportunities domainMock = new Mocks.Opportunities(mocks);
IOpportunitiesSelector selectorMock = new Mocks.OpportunitiesSelector(mocks);

To generate the Mocks class used above use the ApexMocks Generator, you can run it via the Ant tool. The apex-mocks-generator-3.1.2.jar file can be downloaded from the ApexMocks repo here.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="Apex Commons Sample Application" default="generate.mocks" basedir=".">

	<target name="generate.mocks">
		<java classname="com.financialforce.apexmocks.ApexMockGenerator">
			<classpath>
				<pathelement location="${basedir}/bin/apex-mocks-generator-3.1.2.jar"/>
			</classpath>
			<arg value="${basedir}/fflib-sample-code/src/classes"/>
			<arg value="${basedir}/interfacemocks.properties"/>
			<arg value="Mocks"/>
			<arg value="${basedir}/fflib-sample-code/src/classes"/>
		</java>
	</target>

</project>

You can configure the output of the tool using a properties file (you can find more information here).

IOpportunities=Opportunities:fflib_SObjectMocks.SObjectDomain
IOpportunitiesSelector=OpportunitiesSelector:fflib_SObjectMocks.SObjectSelector
IOpportunitiesService=OpportunitiesService

The generated mock classes are contained as inner classes in the Mocks.cls class and also implement the interfaces you define, just as the real classes do. You can choose to add the above Ant tool call into your build scripts or just simply retain the class in your org refreshing it by re-run the tool whenever your interfaces change.

/* Generated by apex-mocks-generator version 3.1.2 */
@isTest
public class Mocks
{
	public class OpportunitiesService
		implements IOpportunitiesService
	{
		// Mock implementations of the interface methods...
	}

	public class OpportunitiesSelector extends fflib_SObjectMocks.SObjectSelector
		implements IOpportunitiesSelector
	{
		// Mock implementations of the interface methods...
	}

	public class Opportunities extends fflib_SObjectMocks.SObjectDomain
		implements IOpportunities
	{
		// Mock implementations of the interface methods...
	}
}

Mocking method responses

Mock classes are dumb by default, so of course you cannot inject them into the upcoming code execution and expect them to work. You have to tell them how to respond when called. They will however record for you when their methods have been called for you to check or assert later. Using the framework you can tell a mock method what to return or exceptions to throw when the class your testing calls it.

So in effect you can teach them to emulate their real counter parts. For example when a Service method calls a Selector method it can return some in memory records as apposed to having to have them setup on the database. Or when the unit of work is used it will record method invocations as apposed to writing to the database.

Here is an example of configuring a Selector mock method to return test record data. Note that you also need to inform the Selector mock what type of SObject it relates to, this is also the case when mocking the Domain layer. Finally be sure to call startStubbing and stopStubbing between your mock configuration code. You can read much more about the ApexMocks API here, which resembles the Java Mockito API as well.

// Given
mocks.startStubbing();
List<Opportunity> testOppsList = new List<Opportunity> {
	new Opportunity(
		Id = fflib_IDGenerator.generate(Opportunity.SObjectType),
		Name = 'Test Opportunity',
		StageName = 'Open',
		Amount = 1000,
		CloseDate = System.today()) };
Set<Id> testOppsSet = new Map<Id, Opportunity>(testOppsList).keySet();
mocks.when(domainMock.sObjectType()).thenReturn(Opportunity.SObjectType);
mocks.when(selectorMock.sObjectType()).thenReturn(Opportunity.SObjectType);
mocks.when(selectorMock.selectByIdWithProducts(testOppsSet)).thenReturn(testOppsList);
mocks.stopStubbing();

TIP: If you want to mock sub-select queries returned from a selector take a look at this.

Injecting your mock implementations

Finally before you call the method your wanting to test, ensure you have injected the mock implementations. So that the calls to the Application class factory methods will return your mock instances over the real implementations.

Application.UnitOfWork.setMock(uowMock);
Application.Domain.setMock(domainMock);
Application.Selector.setMock(selectorMock);

Testing your method and asserting the results

Calling your method to test is a straight forward as you would expect. If it returns values or modifies parameters you can assert those values. However the ApexMocks framework also allows you to add further behavioural assertions that add further confidence the code your testing is working the way it should. In this case we are wanting to assert or verify (to using mocking speak) the correct information was passed onto the domain and selector classes.

// When
OpportunitiesService.applyDiscounts(testOppsSet, discountPercent);

// Then
((IOpportunitiesSelector)
	mocks.verify(selectorMock)).selectByIdWithProducts(testOppsSet);
((IOpportunities)
	mocks.verify(domainMock)).applyDiscount(discountPercent, uowMock);
((fflib_ISObjectUnitOfWork)
	mocks.verify(uowMock, 1)).commitWork();

TIP: You can verify method calls have been made and also how many times. For example checking a method is only called a specific number of times can help add some level of performance and optimisation checking into your tests.

Summary

The full API for ApecMocks is outside the scope of this blog series, and frankly Paul Hardaker and Jessie Altman have done a much better job, take a look at the full list of documentation links here. Finally keep in mind my comments at the start of this series, this is not to be seen as a total alternative to traditional Apex test method writing. Merely another option to consider when your wanting a more focused means to test specific methods in more varied ways without incurring the development and execution costs of having to setup all of your applications data in each test method.


225 Comments

Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries – Spring’15 Release

This tool has had a steady number of releases last year, containing a few bug fixes and tweaks. This Spring’15 release contains a few enhancements i’d like to talk about in more detail in this blog. So lets get started with the list…

  • Support for Count Distinct rollups
  • Support for Picklist / Text based rollups via Concatenate and Concatenate Distinct operations
  • Support for Rolling up First or Last child records ordered by fields on the child such as Created by Date
  • Support for Lightning Process Builder

UPGRADE NOTE: The Lookup Rollup Summaries object has some new fields and pick list values to support the above features. If you are upgrading you will need to add these fields and pick list values manually. I have listed these in the README.

NewRollup

The following sections go into more details on each of the features highlighted above.

Support for Count Distinct rollups

If you want to exclude duplicate values from the Field to Aggregate on the child object select the Count Distinct option. For example if your counting Car__c child records by Colour__c and it has 4 records, Red, Green, Blue, Red, the count would result in 3 being stored in the Aggregate Result Field. You can read more about the original idea here.

Support for Picklist / Text based rollups

TextRollupThe rollup operations Sum, Min, Max, Avg, Count and Count Distinct operations are still restricted to rolling up number and date/time fields as per the previous releases of the tool.

However this version of the tool now supports new operations Concatenate and Concatenate Distinct that support text based fields. Allowing you to effectively concatenate field values on children into a multi-picklist or text field on the parent object record.

By default children are concatenated based on ascending order of the values in the Field to Aggregate field. However you can also use the Field to Order By field to specify an alternative child field to order by. You can define a delimiter via the Concatenate Delimiter field. You can also enter BR() in this field to add new lines between the values or a semi-colon ; character to support multi-picklist fields. You can read more about the original idea here.

Support for Rolling up First or Last child records

RollupFirstBy using the new First and Last operations you can choose to store the first or last record of the associated child records in the parent field. As with the concatenate feature above, the Field to Aggregate is used to order the child records in ascending order. However the Field to Order By field can also be used to order by an alternative field. Original idea here.

Support for Lightning Process Builder

To date the tool requires a small Apex Trigger to be deployed via the Manage Child Trigger button. With added support for Lightning Process Builder actions. This allows rollup calculations to be performed when creating or updating child object records. Sadly for the moment Process Builder does not support record deletion, so if your rollups require calculation on create, update and delete, please stick to the traditional approach.

ProcessBuilderModeTo use the feature ensure you have selected Process Builder from the Calculation Mode field and specified a unique name for the rollup definition in the Lookup Rollup Summary Unique Name. RollupUniqueName

Once this is configured your ready to add an Action in the Process Builder to execute the rollup. The following Process shows an example configuration.

ProcessBuilder1

ProcessBuilder2

As you’ve seen from some of my more recent blogs, i’m getting quite excited about Process Builder. However i have to say on further inspection, its got a few limits that really stop it for now being really super powerful! Having support for handling deletion of records and also some details in terms of how optimal it invokes the actions prevent me from recommending this feature in production. Please give me your thoughts on how else you think it could be used.


9 Comments

Permission Sets and Packaging

Permission Sets have been giving me and an unlucky few who are unable to install my Declarative Rollup Summary Tool some headaches since i introduced them. Thankfully I’ve recently discovered why and thought it worth sharing along with some other best practices i have adopted around packaging permission sets since…

Package install failures due to Permission Sets

After including Permission Sets in my package, I found that some users where failing to install the package, they received via email, the following type of error (numbers in brackets tended to differ).

Your requested install failed. Please try this again.
None of the data or setup information in your salesforce.com organization should have been 
 affected by this error.
If this error persists, contact salesforce.com Support through your normal channels
 and reference number: 604940119-57161 (929381962)

It was frustrating that i could not help them decode this message, it required them to raise a Salesforce support case and pass their org ID and error codes on the case. For those that did this, it became apparent after several instances, a theme was developing, a package platform feature dependency!

Normally such things surface in the install UI for the user to review and resolve. Dependencies also appear when you click the View Dependencies button prior to uploading your package. However it seems that Salesforce is currently not quite so smart in the area of Permission Sets and dependency management, as these are hidden from both!

Basically i had inadvertently packaged dependencies to features like Ideas and Streaming API via including my Permission Sets, one of which i had chosen to enable the Author Apex permission. This system permission seems to enable a lot of other permissions as well as enabling other object permissions (including optional features like Ideas, which happened to be enabled in my packaging org). Then during package install if for historic reasons the subscriber org didn’t have these features enabled the rather unhelpful error above occurs!

Scrubbing my Permission Sets

I decided enough was enough and wanted to eradicate any Salesforce standard permission from my packaged Permission Sets. This was harder than i thought, since simply editing the .permissionset file and uploading it didn’t not remove anything (this approach is only suitable for changing or adding permissions within a permission set).

Next having removed entries from the .permissionset file, i went into the Permission Set UI within the packaging org and set about un-ticking everything not related to my objects, classes and pages. This soon became quite an undertaking and i wanted to be sure. I then recalled that Permission Sets are cool because they have an Object API!

I started to use the following queries in the Developer Console to view and delete on mass anything i didn’t want, now i was sure i had removed any traces of any potentially dangerous and hidden dependencies that would block my package installs. I obtained the Permission Set ID below from the URL when browsing it in the UI.

select Id, SobjectType, PermissionsCreate, PermissionsEdit, PermissionsDelete, PermissionsRead
  from ObjectPermissions where ParentId = '0PSb0000000HT5A'
select Id, SobjectType, Field
  from FieldPermissions where ParentId = '0PSb0000000HT5A'

CheckObjectPermissions

Note that System Permissions (such as Author Apex) which are shown in the UI, currently don’t have an Object API, so you cannot validate them via SOQL. However at least these are listed on a single page so are easier to check visually.

Lessons learned so far…

So here are a few lessons i’ve learned to date around using Permission Sets…

  • Don’t enable System Permissions unless your 100% sure what other permissions they enable!
  • When editing your .permissionset files don’t assume entries you remove will be removed from the org.
  • Use SOQL to query your Permission Sets to check they are exactly what you want before uploading your package
  • Don’t make your Permission Sets based on a specific User License type (this is covered in the Salesforce docs but i thought worth a reminder here as it cannot be undone).
  • Do design your Permission Sets based on feature and function and not based on user roles (which are less likely to match your perception of the role from one subscriber to another). Doing the former will reduce the chances of admins cloning your Permission Sets and loosing out on them being upgraded in the future as your package evolves.


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Super ListView Viewer using Winter’15 ListView API

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.
    listviewlistviews
  • /services/data/v32.0/sobjects/Account/listviews/{Id}/describe – Returns the definition of the List View and the SOQL! Documentation here.
    listviewdescribe
  • /services/data/v32.0/sobjects/Account/listviews/{Id}/results – Returns the column definitions of the List View and the records it returns. Documentation here.
    listviewresults

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!

screenshot

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!