After last weeks post, let’s take a look at how we can send a PDF attachment via a Visualforce email template. Our goal is to be able to automatically send an invoice to our customer whenever their Battle Station is fully operational. We will be taking the Battle Station Invoice PDF and making it something we can attach to an email and then create a workflow to send that email when the status changes to complete.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve seen several posts on the Developer forums asking how to set PDF headers and footers with Visualforce. I decided to sit down and try my hand at it. If you have done the Battle Station app on Trailhead, you can try this out on your own sandbox! We will be generating a PDF invoice for the Battle Station app that includes a first page header image and a dynamically generated footer.

If you’ve ever started to learn your second programming language, you know how important it is to have example of the new language to help you understand the syntax. In my opinion, once you’ve learned the concepts behind programming (loops, control statements, etc) it’s pretty much just learning the syntax to get started. That’s where the folks over at Rosetta Code come in, to make it easier to learn new languages.

If you’ve ever written a trigger that stores Date.now(), then this scene from Spaceballs may seem very familiar. This is how I feel when testing now.

• Dark Helmet: What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie?
• Colonel Sandurz: Now. You’re looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now.
• Dark Helmet: What happened to then?
• Colonel Sandurz: We passed then.
• Dark Helmet: When?
• Colonel Sandurz: Just now. We’re at now now.
• Dark Helmet: Go back to then.
• Colonel Sandurz: When?
• Dark Helmet: Now.
• Colonel Sandurz: Now
• Dark Helmet: Now.

The problem comes down to knowing when now is. Obviously, now is something that’s in constant flux and will change throughout your test. But there are ways to be able to know when now really is in your test.

In a previous post, I talked about how to pull Runkeeper data into Salesforce. The key portion of this revolved around JSON parsing of the data into Apex classes. In this post I’ll talk about how to use Object Oriented structures to extend the classes previously written to support additional data.

Back in 2013 a couple of folks from the Salesforce community challenged each other to do the Runners World Run Streak. Eight of us started the challenge of running at least one mile a day for 35 days. Of those eight, four completed the challenge. This sparked a fire in me to try to keep the streak alive. Starting November 28th 2013 I ran at least a mile a day until February 23rd 2013 (88 days) when my son was born. After a little more than a week off (which felt like a lifetime) I picked back up and decided to keep the streak going for as long as possible. Yesterday (March 6th) marks two years of running every day. I wanted to take a little bit of time to put down what I’ve learned about running and about myself over these two years.

For the past couple of years I’ve dabbled in running and getting data from Runkeeper. I decided that I’d give it a try to have the entire process inside of Salesforce. This provided an interesting challenge for me, since it’s the first time I’ve setup the oAuth flow from Salesforce back to Salesforce. This post will likely be the first of a couple in this theme of pulling data from Runkeeper. The code included here is just a base for what can be done. I’ll be maintaining an updated version of the RunkeeperUtils class on my github, so make sure you check there for the most recent version of everything. So let’s go over how we can do this

The Trailhead team released another set of fantastic modules this past week. But unlike many of the other modules, these delve into the world of Salesforce itself, and not really into Salesforce the product. Let’s take a look into each of these modules a bit deeper.

Last week I covered how to send an attachment from Salesforce to Jira. This week we’ll cover how to attach a file from Salesforce into the Amazons S3 cloud. Unlike the Jira uploading, we will not be associating these files with a specific case, but instead will be uploading them to a generic bucket. This can be modified by changing how the filename is generated on line 8 of the code.

I was recently challenged with the task of sending an attachment from Salesforce to Jira. Looking over the documentation, this doesn’t appear to be too hard. The toughest part is that Jira wants a multi-part form upload for the attachments and this can be a bit of a headache to do in Apex. Following this post as a guide for multi-part form upload, we can adapt it to the format that Jira expects.