Crowd sourced getting started guide for Force.com developers.

Getting started with force.com platform is an interesting roller coaster ride for developers of any experience level. I tried bringing some of those newbie experiences in this post, and then a guide that can help newbie’s to get up to speed quickly with platform.

the force.com newbie story !

Fresh graduates mostly compare it with C/C++ and try searching out similar fun out here.

For experienced it’s a different sort of comparison from various degrees and angles :) I was from Java/J2EE background for me it was a huge change in mindset, i.e. I was missing

Multiselect picklist jquery plugin for iPad and Desktop browsers

We recently came across a problem, we have to develop a multi-row/multiselect picklist that looks similar in both desktop and iPad browser.

We could have easily used the usual Visualforce tag i.e. <apex:selectList …/> for the purpose, like this

<apex:selectList id="contactPickList" value="{!selectedContactIds}"  multiselect="true" size="4">
   <apex:selectOptions value="{!contactOptions}"/>
 </apex:selectList>

But iPad doesn’t supports “size” attribute on HTML <select> tag, and to save real state on page it always shows picklists in one line. Picklist options are shown in popup on click.

We are troubled by this difference, as the UI was looking very different in iPad and desktop. You can assume that we are developing UI having Salesforce “Customize you tabs” type interface, here is the difference

Resolved : “Field is not writeable: Sobject__Share.RowCause” !

This post is about an issue that comes with Apex managed sharing, i.e.

System.SObjectException: Field is not writeable: Sobject__Share.RowCause

We faced this problem recently, and tried searching for this problem on force.com boards, but no solution was available, I just found few open questions like

• http://boards.developerforce.com/t5/Apex-Code-Development/Urgent-help-migration-error-quot-RowCause-filed-not-writable/td-p/137271
• http://boards.developerforce.com/t5/Apex-Code-Development/Can-Apex-Managed-Sharing-be-used-in-a-Class-declared-with-quot/td-p/164916

Yet another Apex Trigger Template !

I know Trigger templates are previously discussed also in great detail. We have excellent posts available by Steve Andersen(Gokubi) and Mike Leach on the same. Here is my small journey on Triggers

• I started developing on force.com, I used bare bone approach as mentioned in Apex developer guide.
• After sometime I was  using something similar to what Steve mentioned in his blog, I was happy to see that Steve suggested a similar practice.
• Eventually tried something that is similar to what Mike suggested in his blog.

After trying all of the above trigger templates, I was still not happy when working solo or when working with a big team of engineers on the same project. I wanted something simple to adopt easily with flexibility to extend/add as required.

Expecting more Java goodness in Apex?

Apex Runtime Update for Developer Edition Orgs complies Apex code to Java byte code. This change is awesome from performance improvements standpoint, but shall we expect more Java into Apex also ?

Few of the following Java features would be a nice addition to Apex: