forcedotcom

on Apex, forcedotcom, Uncategorized

dateConvert Component

Someone recently was trying to resolve a problem of changing the timezone on a date field for use within a VisualForce email template. I threw together this quick component that can change the timezone as well as the format. There is a brief demo VisualForce page below I used on Account to view the created date. I’ll update the post later with some more detailed instructions on how to install this into your org for non developer types. And I will write some test code since you’ll need it to move this to production, but first I’m going to go celebrate my birthday.

dateConvert.component

<apex:component access="global" selfClosing="true" controller="dateConvert">
    <apex:attribute name="format" assignTo="{!dateFormat}" access="global" type="String" default="M/d/yyyy h:mm a" description="Format of the datetime field"/>
    <apex:attribute name="field" assignTo="{!dateField}" access="global" type="DateTime" required="true" description="Field to convert"/>
    <apex:attribute name="timezone" assignTo="{!dateTimezone}" access="global" type="String" default="GMT" description="Timezone to convert to"/>
    
    <apex:outputText value="{!output}"/>
</apex:component>

dateConvert.cls

public class dateConvert {
    public String dateTimeZone {
        get;
        set;
    }
    public DateTime dateField {
        get;
        set;
    }
    public String output {
        get {
            return dateField.format(this.dateFormat, this.dateTimeZone);
        }
    }
    public String dateFormat {
        get;
        set;
    }
}

Example usage in a VisualForce page

<apex:page standardController="Account">
    <apex:pageBlock >
        <apex:pageBlockSection >
            <apex:pageBlockSectionItem >
                <c:dateConvert field="{!Account.CreatedDate}" timezone="America/Chicago"/><br/>
            </apex:pageBlockSectionItem>
            <apex:outputField value="{!Account.CreatedDate}"/>
        </apex:pageBlockSection>
    </apex:pageBlock>
</apex:page>
on forcedotcom tagged , , ,

Removing Chatter feed from the home page

Update: This method no longer works due to changes in Salesforce Home Page Components.

 

Holy cow I’m actually alive, although I can’t say the same for my blog. I finally decided to put something up here on the blog again to help a fellow force.com user. This code can be applied to your home page via an HTML home page component to remove the Chatter feed at the top of the page.

Note Don’t forget to hit “show html” before pasting the code into the component.

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$j = jQuery.noConflict();
$j('.chatterfeedshell').parent().remove();
</script>

Once you’ve created the component add it onto the home page layout and it’ll hide the content. The only downside I see so far is it created an additional section in the home page. If you already have an existing HTML component you can just paste this code into it to hide this additional section.

Hopefully I’ll be able to turn this post into a momentum and start posting some more. I’ll refine this post some more later tonight with some images and steps and possibly a non jQuery solution for anyone still living in the dark ages.

on Apex, forcedotcom tagged , ,

Chaining executions with actionFunction

A problem was posed recently for another developer in the forcedotcom community where he was running out of http callouts while trying to use a REST API service. I figured this is the perfect reason to take a break and post a new blog post.

One solution I’ve used in the past to get around issues like this when working in VisualForce is to chain actions together. This solution uses actionFunction with names that are set in the controller. If after the rerender the string is not null the oncomplete javascript will kick off the next action in turn giving another 10 callouts if necessary. I tend to use this solution frequently with slight modifications between booleans to call the same action.

One example of this is calling a web service that has a timeout set. You can chain the action to a boolean in the oncomplete which will start the action again until you stop it with the boolean, usually after 3 or so tries.

I’m still a newbie to WordPress so I’m getting used to the code highlighting plugins. SyntaxHighlighter takes issue with my xml have self closing tags, so just know the actionfunctions and commandbutton don’t require a specific closing tag like that, it can use the standard /> closing tag. This doesn’t apply anymore, code highlighting was fixed finally

ChainedActionController.cls

public class ChainedActionController {
    public ChainedActionController() { }
    
    private Integer chainMax = 5;
    private Integer chainCount = 0;
    
    
    public String outputText {
        get {
            if(outputText == null) outputText = '';
            return outputText;
        }
        set;
    }
    
    public String chainedActionFunction {
        get {
            if(chainedActionFunction == null) chainedActionFunction = '';
            return chainedActionFunction;
        }
        set;
    }
    
    public void actionOne() {
        this.outputText = 'actionOne set this text';
        
        // set the next chain if we haven't exceeded the defined max count
        if(chainCount++ < chainMax) {
            this.chainedActionFunction = 'actionTwo';
        } else { 
            this.chainedActionFunction = '';
        }
    }
    
    public void actionTwo() {    
        this.outputText = 'actionTwo set this text';
        
        // this could also be done with booleans depending on your use case
        if(chainCount++ < chainMax) {
            this.chainedActionFunction = 'actionOne';
        } else { 
            this.chainedActionFunction = '';
        }
    }
    
}

ChainedActionExample.page

<apex:page controller="ChainedActionController">
    <apex:form id="inputForm">
        <div style="border: 1px solid #777; background-color: #efefef; color: #444; padding: 5px;">
             output: {!outputText}
        </div>        
        <br/><br/>
        Status:
        <apex:actionStatus id="actOne">
            <apex:facet name="start">
                Action one is running!
            </apex:facet>
        </apex:actionStatus>
        <apex:actionStatus id="actTwo">
            <apex:facet name="start">
                Action one is running!
            </apex:facet>
        </apex:actionStatus>
        <br/><br/>
        <apex:actionFunction status="actOne" name="actionOne" action="{!actionOne}" rerender="inputForm" oncomplete="if('{!chainedActionFunction}' != '') eval('{!chainedActionFunction}();')" />
        <apex:actionFunction status="actTwo" name="actionTwo" action="{!actionTwo}" rerender="inputForm" oncomplete="if({!chainedActionFunction}) eval('{!chainedActionFunction}();')"/>
        <apex:commandButton status="actOne" action="{!actionOne}" rerender="inputForm" oncomplete="if({!chainedActionFunction}) eval('{!chainedActionFunction}();')" value="Start"/>
    </apex:form>
</apex:page>
on Apex, forcedotcom tagged , , , ,

Converting string to decimal character array in Apex

Recently I had to find a way to convert strings into their ascii decimal value. I solved this by converting to hex first, and then using some simple math to get the decimal value of each character. This won’t work on double byte characters, but that wasn’t my use case so for now this will work for me.

Edit: After some thinking, making this double byte or even multiple byte wouldn’t be too hard if you were to figure out the ratio of input length to hex output length, then increase the formula to increase the power of 16. I’ll try to get back to this later this week and update for those using multi byte characters.

Edit2: After more investigation and learning the ins and outs of UTF8 I now fully understand the return values of the EncodingUtil.convertToHex method. It returns bytes in UTF8 format. Each byte explains how many bytes that character uses. Some bytes use 1 (old school ascii compatible 0-127), some use 2, 3 or even 4. The range in the first byte tells a story about that character. I have a method to convert these to decimals that can be parsed by String.fromCharArray if anyone is interested. So since each byte is encoded in this, this technically handles UTF8 just fine, and works perfect for my apex ported AES encryption :-)

private static Map<String,Integer> hexMap = new Map<String,Integer>();
static {
	hexMap.put('0',0);
	hexMap.put('1',1);
	hexMap.put('2',2);
	hexMap.put('3',3);
	hexMap.put('4',4);
	hexMap.put('5',5);
	hexMap.put('6',6);
	hexMap.put('7',7);
	hexMap.put('8',8);
	hexMap.put('9',9);
	hexMap.put('A',10);
	hexMap.put('B',11);
	hexMap.put('C',12);
	hexMap.put('D',13);
	hexMap.put('E',14);
	hexMap.put('F',15);
	hexMap.put('a',10);
	hexMap.put('b',11);
	hexMap.put('c',12);
	hexMap.put('d',13);
	hexMap.put('e',14);
	hexMap.put('f',15);
}

public static List<Integer> stringToInt(String input) {
	String hex = EncodingUtil.convertToHex(Blob.valueOf(input));
	List<Integer> retValues = new List<Integer>();

	for(Integer i=0;i<hex.length();i+=2) {
		retValues.add( (hexMap.get(hex.substring(i,i+1))*16) + (hexMap.get(hex.substring(i+1,i+2))) );
	}
	return retValues;
}