Monthly Archives: February 2015

Salesforce Lightning Connector (External Data Source / External Objects )

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What is it?

  • In short: This is a new SFDC feature to retrieve and show data in SFDC without save it in the platform. 
  • External Data Source: Connection to external service to retrieve data on the fly and show it in SFDC. It could be OData 2,0 or URL Rest.
  • External Object: New type of Custom object which works as a wrapper  to expose external data.
  • Full detail in the official doc or a more lazy introduction on this video

When use it?

  • When you have to integrate a service that support OData 2.0.
  • When you are planning just ReadOnly integration.
  • When you need that data in SFDC just to be rendered and not to be calculated (what I mean is to use it in a workflow process). This is partially true depending on your intentions when accessing this data thought APEX.

How to use it?

  • Coming soon…..

Important to know

  • Data is NEVER stored in SFDC
  • External Object as an API Name like OBJECTNAME__x
  • External Object are exposed to SOQL and Apex (Wow! Yeah!!)
  • Also Views, related lists (thought External Lookup Relationship ) PageLayouts and Salesforce1
  • Global Search is supported
  • It is always possible to add a proxy service to translate any source to OData. Jitterbit and other services support it.
  • High Data Volume checkbox bypassed most of limits.
  • The authentication could be: Anonymous, Per User o Unique. Oauth 2.0 or Password.

Limitations

  • Take in mind that this feature will require a special licence.
  • External Objects are not available for: reporting or workflows.
  • External Objects are READ-ONLY (I hope this would change soon since OData is Full CRUD supported).
  • Performance could be affected by the external load. Latency would be poor in some cases.
  • There are a limit of queries to be executed by hour.
  • More details in the official doc

 

Enjoy

Martín

About Martin Borthiry

I’m a fully trained and qualified software engineer with more than 15 years of varied experience, specialized in frontend performance, web developing , cloud computing, salesforce, as well as CRM functionalties and Social Networks. Specialties: Salesforce.com Platform & Web Performance Optimization. Salesforce.com Developer and Administrator Certified. Senior Frontend, Javascript and HTML5. Heavy Ajax WebApps Mobile WebApps – Phonegap Webapps Developer (Php/Django/Python) Team Work & Managment

Salesforce1 Tip: How to set different Visualfore page for Salesforce 1 and desktop UI

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Why

If you have a basic knowledge about mobile UX, you would know that it is quite important to improve the functionality for mobile in order to improve the performance, visualisation and other device implications.
Having said that, our first approach as Salesforce developers is to minify the amount of fields, related lists and also some specific functionality in the standard page layout.
There are two ways to address that:
A) One responsive page
B) Two specific pages
In the second case Salesforce does not allow you to set an specify Visualforce page for each platform frontend: Salesforce1(mobile) or FullSite (Desktop).
How
However you can do the following:
  1. Set the standard action (View for instance) pointing your Desktop Visualforce page.
  2. Set to false the mobile availability checkbox in that VF page.
  3. Create the second (mobile friendly) Visualforce page. Be sure that you are using a standard controller if you consider to override Edit/View actions.
  4. Check It true for  “available for Mobile apps”
  5. Create a Publisher Action pointing your new VF page.
There you have ;)

About Martin Borthiry

I’m a fully trained and qualified software engineer with more than 15 years of varied experience, specialized in frontend performance, web developing , cloud computing, salesforce, as well as CRM functionalties and Social Networks. Specialties: Salesforce.com Platform & Web Performance Optimization. Salesforce.com Developer and Administrator Certified. Senior Frontend, Javascript and HTML5. Heavy Ajax WebApps Mobile WebApps – Phonegap Webapps Developer (Php/Django/Python) Team Work & Managment