The more moving pieces you have with triggers and classes the more you want to reduce the number of SOQL queries. One way to do this is to have Utility classes that do a lot of the heavy lifting. The problem with this is that you don’t want to call a utility method that does a query every time, because if you call it from different triggers you’ll end up with multiple calls. This is where overloading static variables can come in.

The Problem

Lets say you have a trigger on a Contact that needs information from our mostly static MyObject__c and then the Contact trigger then updates a Case. The Case trigger also need information from the MyObject__c. Normally this would require two SOQL queries even if it was in a utility class. We can use some of the built-in functionality in Apex to overload a static variable.

Anyone that has ever had multiple triggers on objects in Salesforce knows that it can be very painful to manage them. Because of the way Salesforce chooses to run the triggers your code can be run in a non-deterministic order. In addition to this, having to sort through multiple files to find the one piece of code you are looking to update can be painful.

To combat this, you can take your triggers and condense them down into a single trigger and a single class. Inside this class you would have a method containing each of your individual triggers.

Since I switched over to using vim as my primary mode of Salesforce development, I’ve been asked several times how I’ve configured vim. Well, it’s about time I show the man behind the curtain. My primary vim config file is quite large now, but I’ve condensed it down to the parts that I think are most pertinent to Salesforce development.

In a previous post I talked about writing webservices for Salesforce. In this post I’ll discuss how to test your webservice with soapUI without having to write any additional code.

Getting soapUI

You will need to install the Open Source version of soapUI from their sourceforge. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

Preface

At my current job, we have several external systems that interact with Salesforce, and they do so through web-services. This document will cover what I have learned in regards to web-services, caveats with them and common pitfalls.

Overview

The goal of our web-services is to provide a single point of entry for each major object represented in Salesforce. A major object would be Account, Case, Case Comment etc. The reason this is differentiated is that for instance, Case Groups would under the AccountAPI since they are a minor object. Each web-service consists of two parts. First the actual web-service class which holds the externally facing methods and from which the WSDL is generated. The second part is that of the util class which holds all of the logic and is reusable.

So with steam coming out on the Mac and with the Humble Indie Bundle working on all three, there is a problem with keeping all of your saves in sync. Not any more. This is all thanks to dropbox.

What is dropbox?

Dropbox is a cross-platform application / website that keeps files in sync and gives you 2Gb of storage space for free. If you’re not a dropbox user already, you can sign up here.

I recently challenged myself to come up with a way to make udev automatically backup when you plug in a USB harddrive. I did all my testing with a USB stick drive, but since they both show up as block devices to the kernel, it shouldn’t matter.

UDEV Rules

To start with, we need to set up static naming for the storage device that you want to make into backup disk. Start by plugging in the disk. (Now I’m not using Gnome or KDE so I’m not sure what their automounter will do. So, you might have to find a way to exclude it from the automounter. We need to find out the “model” of the drive. My udev rules are pretty basic, and will work since most people don’t have more than one the same model of USB drive laying around that they would use. You can always modify the udev rules to work for you.

Screen is a great tool, and it allows you do to alot of neat things. One of my favorites is binding commands to key strokes. So all you have to do is hit F5 and it will start something in the background. Such as a build command. The problem is, you either get no output, or you get spam all over your screen. Well I’ve finally found a way around that. The answer lies in ANSI Privacy Messages.

One of the biggest problems with irssi is that if you run it on remote machine, it can be quite hard to get notifications. For the past couple of years, I’ve been running a plugin called fnotify that writes notifications to a file, then using another script I read that file and print it out with libnotify. There are a couple of problems with this:

1. libnotify is ugly
2. takes up diskspace if you don’t clear the queue
3. requires you to either have the script, or remember the ridiculously long command