Trailhead

Table Header in PDFs with Visualforce

by Patrick Connelly posted on November 15, 2016

One of the problems I had with the way that we generated the PDFs in previous Battle Station Invoice posts was that the table header wasn’t repeated for long lists of supplies or resources that continued on the next page. There’s a simple way to add the table header for PDFs generated in Salesforce using the flying saucer mark-up but that won’t generate the table header correctly for us. It seems that the -fs-table-paginate tag does not play well when combined with a Visualforce component so we’ll need to take a bit more of a native CSS approach.

If you are doing this with plain Visualforce and apex:pageBlockTable, the -fs-table-paginate is the way to go.

Trailhead: Apex Specialist Superbadge

by Patrick Connelly posted on June 06, 2016

Salesforce has released a new section under Trailhead called Superbadges, and they’re pretty awesome.

Superbadges?

Superbadges.

So if you’re familiar with Trailhead Projects, Superbadges are very similar to these but instead of guiding you through the process, you are given a set of requirements and you are required to implement it. All of the badges have requirements that you must meet before you can even start them. This is nice because it encourages you to learn the content before diving in. This way, the challenge of the badge is just building on your existing skills instead of teaching you new ones. For the first release, there are four Superbadges that you can earn:


Trailhead: Entitlement Management

by Patrick Connelly posted on May 23, 2016

It’s a pretty well known fact that I’m a big fan of Entitlement Management. I’ve given a Dreamforce talk, been recorded by SalesforceU, and even have a github repo for it (it’s a work in progress). So when I heard that the Trailhead team was releasing a new Entitlement Management module I was ecstatic.


Watermarking PDFs in Visualforce

by Patrick Connelly posted on May 09, 2016

Keeping on the PDF and Trailhead theme, lets take a look at adding watermarks to our PDFs. There was recently a developer boards post about watermarking a PDF and it dovetailed nicely into the previous posts.


Field Sets and Dynamic Visualforce

by Patrick Connelly posted on April 25, 2016

One of the downsides of the code I posted a couple of weeks ago to generate PDFs is that if you want to add new fields to your invoices, you have to edit the Visualforce page. By updating our Visualforce and using field sets, we can dynamically add fields to our invoices


PDF Attachment with Visualforce

by Patrick Connelly posted on April 18, 2016

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.


PDF Headers and Footers with Visualforce

by Patrick Connelly posted on April 04, 2016

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.


Trailhead: Navigate the Salesforce Advantage

by Patrick Connelly posted on February 22, 2016

Trailhead: Navigate the Salesforce Advantage

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.


Trailhead: Man your battle stations!

by Patrick Connelly posted on December 18, 2015

It’s no secret that I’m a huge Trailhead fan. I’ve written several posts about it. As much as I love Trailhead, I do find that the standard modules are a little tough for new people to see how it can be useful. That is where the Projects come in. The Trailhead Projects give you a goal and walk you through how to do something from start to finish, and in my opinion, it really helps to solidify how the platform can be used and what powerful things you can do without code.


Trailhead Modules: My Favorites

by Patrick Connelly posted on March 19, 2015

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.


Salesforce Trailhead: New Modules

by Patrick Connelly posted on February 03, 2015

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.