Salesforce: Some Insights

Hi all, as evident from the topic, I'm hereby sharing a small list of configuration options available within Salesforce using which a non-programmer can also develop functionalities within salesforce. The best part of using these features is that you save time, save development/ testing effort, deploy and manage it easily. Standard/ Custom Objects Objects a.k.a. table (for database junkies) a.k.a. entity are used to store data within Salesforce. We can use out of the box objects for e.g. Account, Contact, opportunity, lead etc. (along with their powerful features) or create our own custom objects to store required information for e.g. invoice, purchase orders etc. Custom fields As with any entity, you need to store its attribute, similarly in salesforce an object can have fields. Out of the box objects have standard fields. Additionally, custom fields can be added to standard and custom fields. Following are few special types of fields that can be added to enrich product...

How often did each one of us get into a situation where we have to create custom security rules? For e.g. Call center agents should not be able to give credits. Only Supervisors or Finance team can give credits Only Finance and Account Manager can generate invoice. And the most trivial way to achieve it is something like if(profileName == 'Supervisor || profileName == 'Finance'){      // business logic to give credits } else{     //throw error message } Now, one of the best ways to handle this is by using "Custom Permissions". It allows you to leverage Salesforce security infrastructure and loosely bind that to your custom logic. This helps in making your code scalable and robust. You'll learn that below. What are Custom Permissions? Custom Permissions was made GA in Summer '15 (ver 34.0). It is a unique way of creating a custom permission which is required/ to be used by your custom logic. For e.g. in above example, if we create ...

What? Alphanumeric fields which would contain data in encrypted form. Mostly to be used in case of government regulations, as they have processing overhead and certain limitations for e.g. these fields cannot be unique, indexed or have default values. Also, there is a limit of 175 characters. Where? Custom encrypted fields can be be used in various applications and can be displayed on page layouts and can be even included for validations via validation rules and apex code. Why? Certain business needs or government regulations require certain data to be stored in encrypted state and displayed in masked form. For e.g. Social security numbers or credit card numbers. Salesforce makes it easy to achieve it via Custom encrypted fields.  How? Custom encrypted fields can be created as just another custom field with type selected as " Text (Encrypted) ". Master Encryption key key to be used for data encryption can be managed via " Certificate and Key Management " und...

Finally, there are few much needed feature additions to Salesforce's data import wizard.  Note: The Data Import Wizard is currently available through a pilot program. On a high level, I found following improvements:- Improved UI (bit glitches though) with wide screens having lesser height Data mapping on the fly Drag and drop file (thanks to HTML5) Specify actions for e.g. insert, update or both Capability to skip trigger execution for data being imported Improved data mapping with ability to map a column from data file to multiple properties Following is step to step procedure to use it (simplistic flow):- Open wizard Select object, action and provide data file View/ modify data mapping Review import information and confirm For more information visit  https://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=data_import_wizard.htm&language=en_US

What? Extends chatter's capabilities to enable user to take custom actions for e.g. create a new related record or access a visualforce page. Where? It would be accessible via chatter section on Chatter tab, home page or chatter section in detail page of an object. Why? Publisher actions lets administrator/ developer expose additional functionalities to users via chatter feeds. So, now a user can create a new record from chatter feed as he/she used to create new post/ poll etc. For e.g. a user viewing account detail page can create a contact/ opportunity related to the Account, without navigating to any other page. How? Actions can be created from Object setup page or via "Buttons Links and Actions" link for each standard object in Setup and Administration section. There are two types of actions:- Create action :- allows user to create a new record. Administrator can define the fields to be displayed in the create page layout. Additionally, administrator c...

What? Polymorphic key is a relationship field which can relate to more than one type of object as parent. Unlike Lookup and Master-detail relationships which are related to a single object, Polymorphic keys can refer to multiple objects. Where? As of date, Polymorphic keys cannot be created by developers. They are available for specific objects out of the box for e.g. WHOID and WHATID in Task and Event objects. Why? As we know, Salesforce’s data model is strictly relationship based, and the type of objects at both the ends of the relationship is fixed. So, if an object is to be related with multiple objects, then a separate relationship field has to be created for each relationship. Polymorphic keys are required to maintain relationship with multiple types, for e.g. task/ event might be related with various type of records viz. Account, Contact etc. So, a polymorphic key helps in establishing unique access to such disparate relationships. How? Polymorphic keys ...

With permission sets available for some time now, there have been lot of discussions around what is real use of permission sets, what they are capable of, when to use them and when to stay away from them. I am hereby trying to put in some views What? A Permission set is a configuration based mechanism to provide additional capabilities to users, on a temporary basis. It can be viewed as a subset of Profile, wherein it has similar capabilities to define security permissions, but has few lesser options. Where? Permission sets should be used primarily for temporary basis, wherein the access is to be provided for shorter time duration and the access can be removed later.  It can however be used to provide additional access to certain users, as compared to other users using same profile. But, in this case, usage of permission sets is elongated, its suggested to rather create a new profile. Why? It provides a very flexible and easy approach to give additional permis...