Forecasting Quota and Risk of Salesforce Upgrade

Problem

This is a bit of old problem, but we had this custom Visualforce interface in our internal org that allows you to mass insert and edit Forecast Quota.  This has been working fine for years, but when we tried to enter forecast for this year, we suddenly got this error:

Missing Required Field: [Quota Quantity]

However, when we tried to modify the code to allow manual entering of quota, we were getting error indicating that this field is not writable.


Solution

What turned out happen was that you need to have ForecastingType set if you are using ForecastingQuota inside of code after API v28.  Once we enabled a revenue forecast on opportunity (Setup > Customize > Forecasts > Setting), the interface worked again.

Takeaway

This was another lesson on using custom code with Salesforce (especially something that interacts with Standard feature, such as Standard object) and Salesforce upgrade.  Writing custom code can certainly improve the usability of Salesforce, and I do believe it to be one of major feature of Salesforce, but one has to be mindful that it can suddenly get broken without warning.  This is one of the reason why Salesforce recommends using as much of standard functionality as possible (70 to 80% standard functionality is the Salesforce benchmark).

Strange error when saving from Developer Console

This post is more of a reference for future if I encounter this error again, but I had a rather strange error when trying to save a modification to a Apex class from Developer Console:

Failed to create createContainerMember for containerId=undefined: null is not a valid containerId

After some googling, I had found following help article indicating that you need to create a new workspace when this error appears.  This did fix my error, but it doesn't really explain why this error appears.  If you have more in-depth explanation as to why this would happen, let me know.

Taking control of Custom Action in Salesforce1

I have been involved with a few projects that incorporated Visualforce pages into Salesforce1's custom action since the launch of Salesforce1, and one thing I had found annoying was that there was no documentation on how one can take over the action associated with "Submit" and "Cancel" button on top of the custom action page.

However, Salesforce has recently updated their documentations on how you can add your own action to these two buttons using Publisher SDK.  I first saw this on Visualforce Mobile Trailhead, but they have updated Salesforce1 Mobile App Developer Guide to include it as well.

To add your own Javascript action to the "Save" button, you would first include Publisher SDK:

<!-- Publisher SDK -->

<script type='text/javascript' src='/canvas/sdk/js/publisher.js'></script>

Then, you would modify following Javascript function inside your Visualforce page.

// When the panel is displayed, enable the submit button
Sfdc.canvas.publisher.subscribe({name: "publisher.showPanel", onData:function(e) {
    Sfdc.canvas.publisher.publish(
        {name: "publisher.setValidForSubmit", payload: "true"});
}});

// Action to be performed when submit button is pressed
Sfdc.canvas.publisher.subscribe({ name: "publisher.post", onData: function(e) {

    // ***************************************************
    // Add your own action here
    /* myOwnAction([params], 
          // Callback
          function(error, records) {
             if (error) {
               // Do something on error
             }
             else {
               // Close the window
               Sfdc.canvas.publisher.publish(
                { name: "publisher.close", payload:{refresh:"true"}});
             }
       }); */
}});

Tabs and Searching

As you gain more experience with Salesforce, you come to run into limits that make you think "why did they put that limit?"  One of such feature is searching custom object.  Over a year ago, we had a project with a customer who had quite a few custom objects in its org and had used up all their tabs.   One of the requirements for the project is to enable the search on a new custom object, but when we have set all the search layout, we weren't seeing the object in the search.  After some googling, we found out that you can search a custom object only if you have custom tab associated with it.  When we had contacted Salesforce support, we found out that you could purchase additional tabs just so that you can enable additional searching.  Also, you could implement your own Visualforce searching page, but I still find this to be rather strange limitation.

History is in Detail! - Migrating Master-Detail Relationship with History Tracking on Child Object

Problem

Over the years as Force.com developer, I found that migration and trigger are two area where I encountered issues most frequently, and here is another interesting issue with migration in Salesforce.  I had a custom sObject that were in Master-Detail relationship with Account.  When I tried to migrate this object using Force.com Migration Tool, I was getting following error:

duplicate value found <unknown> duplicates value on record with id: <unknown> 

After much googling, I found this post on StackExchange, indicating that History Tracking might be a problem.  When I disabled the history tracking on the object, I was able to migrate the object.

Work-around
With the cause of the problem tracked down, I still found the prospect of manually enabling history tracking on the object and each field in the destination org quite troubling.  With Salesforce.com migration, some manual steps are unavoidable (e.g. Community setup, Quote enablement, etc.), but you do want to minimize the manual steps as much as possible, and I thought there might be a way to automate this step using Force.com Migration Tool.

First solution I considered was creating the object first with a lookup relationship with Account, then have another deployment of the same object with relationship change to Master-Detail relationship.  This did eliminate the "duplicate value..." error, but the problem was that when you change a relationship from Lookup to Master-detail (or vice-versa), it triggers sharing rule recalculation, which causes problem if you had any sharing rule being migrated at the later stage of the deployment step, which we did have for this project.

The eventual solution I came up with was a three-staged migration of the object.  First, I migrated a shell Metadata of the child object with Master-Detail Relationship on, but with history tracking turned off.  Second,  I migrated the shell Metadata file again, but with history tracking turned on.  Finally, I migrated the full retrieval of the child object Metadata.  One issue you have is that you have to manually maintain copies of shell Metadata files for these children objects, but schema for the shell is quite simple and you only have to create these shell files only once, whereas you have to perform manual step, which is prone to error, on every environment you migrate to.

I have checked in the code for the simplified version of this process in my github repository.  You can find it at https://github.com/jpaek/MasterDetailWithHistory.

Takeaway

The error message for this problem was rather misguiding for me, but this shouldn't come as a surprise to us Force.com developers, especially when working with migration.  Googling, as was case here, can help figure out what the problem is, but sometime you do have to manually figure out the problem by playing around with it, which can be quite cumbersome tasks.

Also, I want to point out that, with bit of thinking and experimentation, you can eliminate many of the manual steps involved with migration steps through Force.com Migration Tool.   

Task Trigger and Ugly Un-bulkfiication.

Problem

We had created a trigger on Case Task that would update a custom description field on the parent case with comment from the task when the status of the task changes to "closed."  This trigger worked at the beginning, but then this trigger started to fail with following error message:

Apex Task trigger cannot handle batch operations on recurring tasks.

It turns out that you cannot to have a trigger on event (including task) if you have any batch job on recurring events (see here) and that another team working with this client had implemented a batch apex job that managed recurring tasks related to some other object.  

Work-around

There really wasn't a work-around for this issue.  What we ended up doing was getting rid of the trigger and let user manually copy the value.

Takeaway

Trigger is one of the most problematic aspect of Salesforce.com development with many nuances, this being one of them.  With the release of the new Lightning Process Builder, we finally may have a work-around on this issue and many other trigger-related issues, although I cannot say that with high confidence as this very new feature with Salesforce.com.

Mobile Design Template and Angular.JS

Problem

We had implemented a multi-step wizard for our client.  Two of the requirements for this wizard was that it needed to be mobile-friendly, and it needs to have bilingual support.  To meet this requirement I had tried to implement a mobile version of the wizard using Mobile Design Templates.   I had previously built a simple mobile-friendly Visualforce page using Mobile Design Templates and Underscore.JS following the Getting Started with Mobile Design Templates blog post from Salesforce.

Given the complexity of this application, I had used Angular.JS as the back-end.  However, I ran into trouble when I tried to incorporate the Mobile Design Templates' toggle input into this application.

We had this picklist field with two values that we want to render as a toggle input.  To do so I had the Angular.JS controller called the service that would grab the labels for those two values from Salesforce, in order to meet the bilingual requirement, and set those label as data-on-label and data-off-label.

(function() {

var app = angular.module('app', []);



 app.controller('InputCtrl', function InputCtrl(InputLabelService) {

        var inputScope = this;



        // Get the label of the input form from Salesforce
        InputLabelService.getFormValues().then(
            function(picklists) {
                inputScope. inputLabels = picklists. inputLabels;


               // This renders the toggle input
               $(document).trigger('onTemplateReady');
        });
    });
})();

<section class="border-bottom">

    <div class="content">

    <h3>Input</h3>

        <div class="form-control-group">

            <div class="form-control form-control-toggle" data-on-label="{{inputLabels[0]}}" data-off-label="{{inputLabels[1]}}">

                <input type="checkbox" name="toggle">

             </div>

         </div>

     </div>

 </section>

The problem was that Mobile Design Templates render data-on-label and data-off-label on the toggle input upon the call to 'onTemplateReady' Javascript trigger.  However, because how the two-way binding of Angular.JS is done, the rendering of the toggle input is done before Angular.JS can set the data-on-label and data-off-label with appropriate values, which ended up rendering the toggle input without any label.

Solution

The way I had gotten around this issue was by putting a $watch listener on the inputLabels and to trigger 'onTemplateReady' when it has a new value.

(function() {

var app = angular.module('app', []);



 app.controller('InputCtrl', function InputCtrl(InputLabelService) {

        // Get the label of the input form from Salesforce
        InputLabelService.getFormValues().then(
            function(picklists) {
                $scope.inputLabels = picklists.inputLabels;



                $scope.$watch('inputLabels', function(newVal, oldVal) {



                    if (newVal) {

                       // This renders the toggle input
                       $(document).trigger('onTemplateReady');
                   }
               });
        });
    });
})();

Takeaway

In the end, I actually ended up not using Mobile Design Templates as the tabbed navigation, which I had used in one of the page, didn't work in iPhone.  Instead, I ended up using Bootstrap along with Angular.JS.  I still think Mobile Design Templates is a good tool to have in your tool belt if you are building a very simple mobile application on Salesforce1; however, for any application with a moderate complexity, I would definitely look at alternative, such as Bootstrap I have used for this project or Ionic Framework.

Way in the @future - Problem of using Salesforce as Real-time Relay System

Problem

For one of the project I was on, we had following as one of the requirements.  In this requirement, the System 1 would send a record to Salesforce, which would store the record, transform it based on the data stored in Salesforce and transmit the transformed record to System 2.  The whole process from System 1 to System 2 need to take less than 5 minute to complete.

Originally, we had implemented a trigger on the creation of the original record - Record A - that would transform it and send the transformation - Record A" - to System 2 by calling a web service through a future method.

This has been working as expected for quite sometime.  However, the production org was on NA14, and when the NA14 performance degradation occurred last year, we were witnessing that this request was taking more than half hours, and sometimes more than several hours.

Our investigation revealed that the problem was that the request to the future method gets stuck in the Apex Job Queue due to the degradation issue.  We had investigated both the batch apex and outbound-message workflow, but the problem was that both batch Apex and outbound-message jobs are queued the same way as the future method was.


Workaround

The way we addressed this problem was by implementing a custom web service.  This web service stored the Record A into Salesforce as well as transform the record the same way the trigger was doing.  We had proposed two solutions on how to transmit the transformed record to system 2.  One was for the custom web service make a callout; the second was to return the transformed record to System 1 as the response to the web service call, and System 1 would transmit it to System 2.  Our test revealed that both methods eliminated the queueing issue; however, the client went with the second option given the importance of this process.

Takeaway

The takeaway for me was that Salesforce really isn't a ideal tool for implementing a real-time processing of data, especially if you are using one of asynchronous methods (@future method, batch apex, etc.) as Salesforce do not provide any SLA on the timeliness of these processes.

Curious Case of Disappearing ID

Problem

Last week, I was deploying some changes to the recently deployed Apex classes into the production, but somehow it was failing on previously migrated test classes that were not related to the changes being deployed. To confirm that it had something to do with production environment, rather than the new code, I ran those pre-existing test classes in the production environment, and they were indeed failing even without the changes (I also had them run in Sandbox and confirm that they passed).  My initial suspicion was that someone had added something like a validation rule on the sObjects for which I was generating test data.  Although it was related to the test records being generated, the problem, it turned out, was not related to the validation rule, but something rather more strange.

The test classes had a structure similar to the following where I had a static method to generate test data for all the test methods and a test method that queries for the test data.

@isTest
private class TestCustomController {

  static void createBackground() {

    List<Account> testAccts = new List<Account> {
      new Account(Name = 'Test Account 1'),
      new Account(Name = 'Test Account 2')};
    Database.insert(testAccts);

    List<Account_Child__c> children = new List<Account_Child__c> {
      new Account_Child__c(Name = 'Child 1', Account__c = testAccts[0].id)};
   Database.insert(children);

  }

  static testMethod void manipulateCustomController() {

    TestCustomController.createBackground();

    Account queriedAcct = [SELECT Id FROM Account WHERE Name = 'Test Account 1'];

    // Initialize custom controller, pass on the account ID, 
    //and call method to query for the children of the accounts.

  }

}

To debug the problem in the production, I had put breakpoints in the createBackground() method after the insertion of the account and in the manipulateCustomController() method after query for the account through Developer Console and ran this test class.  What I found out was that the ID of the Test Account 1 in the createBackground() didn't match the ID in the manipulateCustomController()!

Workaround

I tried moving the code in the createBackground() method into the manipulateCustomController() method, and that did resulted in the ID being consistent through out the run of that test method.  However, this did not completely solve the test failure as I had another weird issue where the symbol table not showing some properties of an in-memory instance of a sObject, while it showed in the heap.

Takeaway

This does demonstrate that there are major differences in the internal implementation of the Test and "Production" environments of the Salesforce, mainly that the Test environment is somewhat unstable and has weird kink in it.  Also, it does demonstrate how valuable breakpoints can be when debugging problem in the Production org. 

Incrementing Instance Variable of Virtual Class

Problem

I had following piece of code that increments the instance variable in the parent class within the for-loop of the child class:

public virtual class ParentClass {
  public Integer mapIndex{get; set;}
}
public class ClassWithError extends ParentClass {
  


  public ClassWithError {
    Integer mapSize;
    ...
    for (mapIndex = 0; mapIndex < mapSize; mapIndex++) {
      ...
    }
    ... 
  }
  ...

}

which resulted in following error:

Unknown error: virtual class data member of the parent in for-loop

Solution

The fix is to simply create a temporary variable to do the increment and assign the value of the temporary variable to the instance variable inside the for-loop:

public virtual class ParentClass {
  public Integer mapIndex{get; set;}
}
public class ClassWithError extends ParentClass {
  


  public ClassWithError {
    Integer mapSize;
    ...
    mapIndex = 0;
    for (Integer tempIndex = 0; tempIndex < mapSize; tempIndex ++) {
      mapIndex = tempIndex;
      ...
    }
    ... 
  }
  ...

}

Do Not Expect - Trouble with HTTP

This is a bit of old issue, but I making this post as it does drive home an important lesson regarding Salesforce.com custom code development.  For one of our customer, there was this legacy code that used HTTP Callouts, which has been working for several years.  However, around the time of Winter '14 Release, the users started reporting that that piece of code was not working.

After digging through it, I was able to narrow it down the problem to following error on response from the callout to the external web service - a standard non-descriptive error message that appears for pretty much all error with HTTP callout:

Read Timeout Error
Unexpected End of Element...

Because the way Apex parses the response,  I couldn't find out much more from the debug log.  As a next step, I tried to find out if the issue was related to how Apex handles the Callout or if it was something wrong with the web service itself by duplicating the request that the Apex code is suppose to generate within SoapUI.  However, from SoapUI, we were getting the response that we expect to get, leading us to go back to the Salesforce side of things.

This time around, what I did to find the issue in the Callout was to strip down the Callout message to bare bones to see if it would work and then adding the elements back to the message one at a time.  The bare bone message did indeed work from Salesforce, and it turned out that problem was caused by following header:

Expect: 100-Continue

The fix for this problem was simply removing that header.  I don't know for sure if this issue was introduced with Winter '14 Release or through the changes to the external web service (btw, this limitation is now documented here).  However, this does provide a reminder on the dangers of using custom code in terms of its fragility when it comes to upgrade either to Salesforce or external service it interfaces.