Recently I started working on a project that required a Salesforce CI build system. This has not been a problem for me in the past because I’ve always had a Jenkins host that was setup and maintained by our admins. However, this is a public facing project and I needed something that everyone contributing could have access to.

Travis CI

I had heard of Travis CI before, but had never had a chance to look into it. Travis CI has most of the features that you would expect from any hosted CI solution, but where it drew me in was it’s pricing. It’s free. Well, it’s free if you’re using it for a open public project on GitHub (which I happen to be doing). They do have support for private GitHub repos, but you will have to pay to access them.

Solenopsis

Solenopsisis a project that Scot Floess and I have been working on for several years and it has been doing all of the deployment work for our team since it’s inception. Solenopsis is an extension of the Force.com Ant Migration tool that has a bunch of fancy Ant and Python scripts to help deploy code and manage all that pesky XML.

We’ll be using Solenopsis to deploy to Salesforce via Travis CI. While I use Solenopsis to pull data down and push it back up during development, there is no requirement on the end user using it in order to get the code in the repo. The only “requirement” is that is in the src directory so that we can use other directories to hold our build scripts and other build requirements. If you do use Solenopsis for personal it will make some things easier such as building out the .sfdcignore file which may be needed depending on your configuration.

I’ve blogged previously about Trailhead and some of the new modules, but I thought I’d take the opportunity to write about two of the modules. Both the Change Management and Apex Testing are near and dear to my heart.

Several years ago, I wrote a blog post on developing web services on Salesforce. When helping someone in the IRC channel with web services, I realize that the article was outdated and does not follow some of the design patterns that I have learned after spending a lot of time with web services

What are Web Services?

Let’s start with a little background. Web services are Apex code that you expose out and can consume with either SOAP or REST. Typically this is used to expose complex business logic in an easily consumable way. For example, you could use a web service to combine together an account with all of it’s contacts and return them in a single call. In this article we will be covering SOAP endpoints, but most of the principles also apply to REST endpoints.

I was recently helping a friend with some Apex Controller work for a new VisualForce page, and ran across this error being displayed on the page.

Not serializable: Map<Id,Schema.RecordTypeInfo>

It was weird because it did not appear to be anywhere in the debug logs and it did not email her that an exception occurred anywhere.

A couple of days ago a friend of mine was asking about how to do bitwise math on Salesforce in Apex. I didn’t know how to do it on the platform so I decided to give it a shot.

NOTE: None of the topics covered here are specific to Apex or the Salesforce platform. These concepts extend to most languages. However, the code examples below have been tested and verified on the Salesforce platform.

What are bitwise operations?

Bitwise operations are operations that deal with numbers on a binary level. You see this type of operation mainly in lower level programing languages where you have limited resources and need to store lots of information in a small amount of space. For these examples we’ll be using the match details from DOTA 2 output. This allows for Valve to return a single number to represent lot of information.

I have been working on migrating a site that I designed off of HTML with lots of javascript into a node.js app. The site has very little in the way of user interaction and mainly just displays dynamic data out to the users. This data is pulled from a number of sources but because it’s pulled client-side it’s terrible for SEO (I was young and should have known better).

One of the issues I encountered when migrating this site is that they have a gallery page that pulls data from a SmugMug album. When this site was originally written, SmugMug only had an XML based API and to make it so that JavaScript would play nice, I had to write a php wrapper that would pull down the XML and re-host it on the same domain. I sure as heck wasn’t going to tarnish my pretty little rewrite with PHP. So I tried to find a node module for SmugMug, and much to my surprise, couldn’t. And with that, Humblemug was born.

At the end of last year, Salesforce released the Mobile SDK 3.0 which added quite a few new features. Now, they’ve released the Mobile SDK 3.1 with some really nice new features. I have not had a chance to dive into the Mobile SDK prior to this release, but I think it’s made some great progress and should be something to give a try of.

At the 2014 Dreamforce, Salesforce announced Trailhead, their new platform for learning all about the Salesforce platform, and I have to say it’s pretty great. Anytime someone asks me how they can get started with Salesforce, “Trailhead” is pretty much the first thing out of my mouth. Well that and the IRC channel.

It’s been a couple of months now since Trailhead was released and we’re finally getting new content, and a little bit of updated content for some of the older modules. In addition to these changes the platform seems to have gotten better about it’s error messages when you fail a challenge.

While working on Apex, I discovered an interesting behavior with Maps and the keySet method.

Problem

class TestData {
	public String data;

	public TestData() {}

	public TestData(String data) {
		this.data = data;
	}
}

Map<String, TestData> dataMap = new Map<String, TestData>{
	'foo' => new TestData('foo'),
	'bar' => new TestData('bar')
};

Set<String> keySet = dataMap.keySet();
System.debug(keySet.size()); // 2
System.debug(dataMap.size()); // 2

keySet.remove('foo');
System.debug(keySet.size()); // 1
System.debug(dataMap.size()); // 1

This code does not behave how you would think. If you remove an item from the keySet set it also removes it from the dataMap. What I believe to be happening here is that the keySet method is returning a reference to the key set of the dataMap.

This post will probably only be useful to one other person out there, but it was a fun exercise and thought I’d at least share my output.

One of the biggest challenges I have when running tests is that I will often forget they are running and leave them completed for a while before I go back and remember I ran them. This mainly happens when I’m running an entire class worth of tests and have 5-10 minutes to kill. When first learned about JSforce and it’s cli capability I was in love! So I set out to make it so that the current testing status is displayed inside of my screen session. At the end of it all this is what I came up with: