Calling APEX Rest service using Postman

This post explains the setup of Postman REST Client.  Postman REST client is an add-on for chrome that can connect to Salesforce using OAUTH 2.0 password flow.  Using this method, you can get the access token to call your APEX rest service.  

This topic assumes that you already have Postman REST client.  In case you don't have Postman REST Client, you can download from Chrome Store

Setting up OAUTH

Open Postman and click on new Collection to create a new collection.  Then enter the collection name as shown in below

Click on Create to create a new collection.  This will create a new collection

Now, we are ready to get the access token from Salesforce using OAUTH.  Enter the Authentication URL to salesforce under Normal Settings of the Postman.  For Sandbox the Authentication URL is https://test.salesforce.com/services/oauth2/token and for production it is https://login.salesforce.com/services/oauth2/token.

Then select form-data is a method of POST to salesforce.  The following key value paris are necessary to post the authentication information to Salesforce.  

•  grant_type=password
• client_id=<clientId>
• client_secret=<clientSecret>
• username=<username>
• password=<password>

The values for <clientId> and <clientSecret> need to be configured as an OAUTH application in Salesforce.  For more information on the setting up app access, refer to sale force documentation here..  Save the script.  You have the script read.  Now, add the script to the collection you have just created, by selecting "Add to Collection" button.

To get the access token, click on the "Send" button to get the send the authentication request.  If the user name, password, client id, client secret is correct, salesforce will return a JSON structure that contains access token.

You can now use this access token in the Request header to process calls in Salesforce.

• Crete a new service by cloning the existing OAUTH service. 
•  Change the URL to your apex service.  The format of the URL will be:  <instance_name>/services/apexrest/<servicename>/<version>  In this example we will us helloWorld Service.  so the instance url will be <instance_name>/services/apexrest/helloWorld/
• Create a new Header Authorization parameter that has the access_token from the previous step.
• Set the Content-Type as 'application/json'
• Enter the JSON message in the Body to be submitted to Salesforce

The sample call to helloWorld Service in Salesforce is shown in screen capture below.  This service uses HTTP POST to post the message and the service responds back with the helloWorld in the respective language.

Now you can test your web services by click of a button.  Happy development!

Salesforce Communities Replaces Portals

Salesforce recently announced that Salesforce Communities will be replace Customer Portal and Partner Portal.  This would be great for the customers who currently can't get all the juice out of portals.  For some-time now (4 months), I have been playing around and using communities during the pilot and think that Salesforce finally found a way to make Portals as a true "social" platform for Salesforce's users to communicate with its customers and partners.  I believe there are several advantages for Salesforce communities to switch to the communities if they are already using Customer or Partner Portals. The current customers can readily take advantages for 

• Chatter:  I have seen most of the times when customers hear about Customer or Partner portals, they ask if Chatter can be used.  With Customer/Partner Communities, this feature is available OOTB
• Use of Permission Sets:  If you have used Permission Sets in Salesforce, you would love this features.  You can use profiles and permission sets to configure access to Salesforce objects and resources
• Better Branding:  The branding of communities goes all the way from look and feel to email templates and also chatter.  Currently branding of portals (unless some serious customizations) is awful and needs some serious TLC. With communities, the look is somewhat similar to internal uses see and als the branding can really customized easily.  This will make the interface consistant with rest of Salesforce
• Better Login & forgot password functionality:  No need to configure Sites which will make the login more simpler.  The forgot password functionality will be similar to how currently Salesforce.com sends out an email to uses to reset password.  In the customer portal, the email was sent out temporary password.  With Communities, this security hole is fixed, which means also reduces the need to write custom password reset functionality if you are too serious about sending user name and temp. password in the same email.

I'll add more features and "how-to" in future blogs.

Version problems with Salesforce Lists and Ext.Js

Have you ever wondered, once you use javascript in your left side bar in Salesforce, your list pages just hang and see the ever ubiquitous, spinning wheel?
Well, today I have encountered this as we have been rolling out are beta release of a Appexchange product.

The issue is that when you are using Ext.JS for any development and JavaScripting, make sure that those are compatible with Salesforce Ext.JS libraries.  Otherwise, you will run into JavaScript version libary problems and Salesforce Lists will just not work.  Salesforce Lists usings Ext.JS libraries to pull the lists and this causes all the trouble

Apex Mobile User License Explained

Last week, I was looking at the org. license details of one of our customers who wanted to see if they can use the mobile license.  They did not have mobile licenses or purchased any.  While looking Company Profile section of the Setup, I found that they had "Apex Mobile User" Licenses.  As this does not explain the difference between "Apex Mobile User" and "Salesforce Mobile" licenses, I contacted Salesforce and got a very clear and conscience explanation of these different type licenses

Apparently I was informed by SFDC that "Apex Mobile User" and "Salesforce Mobile" licenses are the one and same.  Apex Mobile User License have full support of mobile features of Salesforce.  This license can work on Visualforce, Page Layouts, Standard or Custom object of Salesforce.  Each users will have to enabled explicitly to enable them for mobile devices.

So, now that the customer has Apex Mobile licenses, their team can leverage these features.

Working with JPlayer and Visualforce

I recently came across a need to have audio on a Visualforce pages.  While embedding a flash based audio would be easy enough to do, it would not solve the purpose as flash is not universal and compatible across.  I started off with HTML5 audio tag.

<audio> tag makes the life of a developer easy.  I tested in Firefox, Chrome and Safari and it was working grand.  Now comes the bummer IE9.  Even though it is written everywhere that IE9 supports audio tag, there is a catch.  IE9 supports only the events of Audio tag but no direct support as other browsers provide.  Moreover the older version of IE (IE8 and IE7) do not support so in a way there is no way you can use audio tag yet considering IE is still one the most users browsers in the market.

Other than the standard browser support, the VF page also had to work on mobile platforms.  jPlayer is on of the most widely used jQuery plugin that addresses this very issue of compatiblity at the same time providing a very nice UI elements to manipulate

Here is the visual force example of using jPlayer plugin with jQuery to make the pages audio enabled.  jPlayer provides nice documentation for events and properties of the plugin

1:  <!DOCTYPE html>  
2:  <apex:page showHeader="false" standardStylesheets="false" >  
3:    <head>  
4:    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />  
5:    <apex:includeScript value="{!$Resource.jQuery14}" />  
6:    <apex:includeScript value="{!URLFOR($Resource.jPlayer,'jPlayer/js/jquery.jplayer.min.js')}"></apex:includeScript>  
7:    <apex:stylesheet value="{!URLFOR($Resource.jPlayer,'jPlayer/skin/blue.monday/jplayer.blue.monday.css')}"></apex:stylesheet>  
8:    <script type="text/javascript">  
9:      $(document).ready(function(){  
10:        alert(this.internal.flash.id);  
11:        $("#jquery_jplayer_1").jPlayer({  
12:          ready: function () {  
13:            $(this).jPlayer("setMedia", {  
14:              mp3:"{!$Resource.Q00000001mp3}",  
15:              oga:"{!$Resource.Q00000001ogg}"  
16:            }).jPlayer("play");  
17:          },  
18:          swfPath: "{!URLFOR($Resource.jPlayer,'jPlayer/js')}",  
19:          supplied: "mp3, oga",  
20:          solution: "flash, html",  
21:          wmode: "window"  
22:        });  
23:      });  
24:    </script>  
25:    </head>  
26:    <body>  
27:      <div id="jquery_jplayer_1" class="jp-jplayer"></div>  
28:      <div id="jp_container_1" class="jp-audio">  
29:        <div class="jp-type-single">  
30:          <div class="jp-gui jp-interface">  
31:            <ul class="jp-controls">  
32:              <li><a href="javascript:;" class="jp-play" tabindex="1">play</a></li>  
33:              <li><a href="javascript:;" class="jp-pause" tabindex="1">pause</a></li>  
34:              <li><a href="javascript:;" class="jp-stop" tabindex="1">stop</a></li>  
35:              <li><a href="javascript:;" class="jp-mute" tabindex="1" title="mute">mute</a></li>  
36:              <li><a href="javascript:;" class="jp-unmute" tabindex="1" title="unmute">unmute</a></li>  
37:              <li><a href="javascript:;" class="jp-volume-max" tabindex="1" title="max volume">max volume</a></li>  
38:            </ul>  
39:            <div class="jp-progress">  
40:              <div class="jp-seek-bar">  
41:                <div class="jp-play-bar"></div>  
42:              </div>  
43:            </div>  
44:            <div class="jp-volume-bar">  
45:              <div class="jp-volume-bar-value"></div>  
46:            </div>  
47:            <div class="jp-time-holder">  
48:              <div class="jp-current-time"></div>  
49:              <div class="jp-duration"></div>  
50:              <ul class="jp-toggles">  
51:                <li><a href="javascript:;" class="jp-repeat" tabindex="1" title="repeat">repeat</a></li>  
52:                <li><a href="javascript:;" class="jp-repeat-off" tabindex="1" title="repeat off">repeat off</a></li>  
53:              </ul>  
54:            </div>  
55:          </div>  
56:          <div class="jp-title">  
57:            <ul>  
58:              <li>Cro Magnon Man</li>  
59:            </ul>  
60:          </div>  
61:          <div class="jp-no-solution">  
62:            <span>Update Required</span>  
63:            To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your <a href="http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/" target="_blank">Flash plugin</a>.  
64:          </div>  
65:        </div>  
66:      </div>  
67:    </body>  
68:  </apex:page>  

Working with 10 KB restriction with Portal Header and Footer

One of the restrictions (out of hundreds!) the Force.com platform places on Portal (Customer/Partner) is the footer and header size cannot be more than 10 KB.  While this may help to increase the speed at the same time, it inhibits the custom long headers and footers that some customers have.

One of the work arounds this issue is to minify the HTML, JavaScript and CSS that is there in the headers.  It really reduced the size of the Headers and Footers.  Will Peavy created this beautiful page to  minify HTML and all of its content.  The note of caution is see that the jQuery/JavaScript is well formed otherwise it becomes very difficult to debug.

Authorization Issue with Sites on Force.com

One of the most annoying things in any development is authorization errors.  The problem multiplies itself when there is no stack trace on where the authorization errors are coming.  Last couple of days we ran into a bunch of Unauthorized errors while accessing, Visualforce pages on public sites.

Today finally was able find the root cause.  The issue was one of the columns referred in the SOQL belongs to the parent object and the object did not have access

Since, Salesforce does not display any error or where exactly this issue is here are few ways I think would help you to quickly identify the root cause

• Enable debugging for the sites users
• Check the debug logs and look for the log just before the authorization error
• Go to the bottom of the log and trace back the code
• One of the easier ways to find the issue is to add debug statements at different points where you think the most probable cause of failure could be
• Check of the statement that last executed
• Verify if the statement is the last statement in the method (apex code)
• If you don't see that it is the last statement, then the failure just occurred at the statement
• If the issue is with the SOQL, see that the columns being queried in the SOQL have access to the Force.com sites

Hopefully these steps will expedite the authorization issues you would encounter.  Let me know if you  found variations of this issue

Static resources on Force.com

One of the interesting things I ran into today while making customer portal pages look like another external web-site using static resources

•  use timestamp in the resource url
• For example if you are using static resources in a zip file (one of the best practices for maintaining static resources) use timestamp in the URL  /resources/id/timestamp/<filepath>

If you don't use this method to access, you may see a delay in the resources getting reflected by Salesforce Content Delivery network.

The other idea may be to use Amazon CDN which would make the page load quicker

Self-Service portal isn’t available for new organizations.

In Spring'12 release notes, Self-Service portal is not available for new organizations.  I'm not sure how many organizations are using self-service portal.  But it is one of the least customizable features on Salesforce.com.  


What does this mean to the organizations?


1) The org. that were planning to use self-service portal can no longer use this free service from salesforce.  
2) Existing orgs. would eventually have to move to a chatter based solution if they are already using self-service or some kind of custom development on customer portal


One undesired thing from this outcome is that, Salesforce is effectively removing the freebie that it offered to its customers to create cases.  Web-to-case is there but it is truly not a self-service solution.  This also means driving users to use more chatter and in the end chatter licenses have to be purchased!

Multiple Users for a contact in SalesForce Customer Portal

This article discusses about

• Creating Multiple Users for the same contact in Customer Portal

While there is already an article on SalesForce wiki about creating a customer portal user, it doesn't address my case of creating users through a trigger instead of the visual force page.  Also, the user creation is not dependent on the contact creation but creation of a contact's child record.  Before I jump into the nuts and bolts of the things, let me give a background.  (Here I assume that you have an understanding of how single sign-on works.  SalesForce has a very good article describing single sign-on process in salesforce.  This article only deals with traditional SAML 2.0 federation authentication as salesforce supports only this type of authentication of Customer Portals.

Background
Recently, I came across an issue related to the single sign-on integration with salesforce.  The existing identity provider system identifies users by the subscription ids.  For example, if John Smith has three subscriptions (S100, S200 and S300), then John is identified by the IDP as a three users who have access to the system.  In SalesForce, we have created Subscriptions of Contact.  So, subscription details (start date, end date, payment, active/inactive, etc..) is the child of the Contact.  That means that we have cannot use subscription IDs to create users; as SFDC only allows one user per contact.  You cannot create multiple portal users for the same contact. 




Implementation
This implementation only addresses the test case and trigger that was developed as a proof of concept to show how we cannot create multiple portal users for the same contact


First we account and contact in the test case