Richard Vanhook
Richard is a certified Force.com & Java developer with over seven years experience in enterprise software development and integration. Linkedin Profile
Homepage: http://www.edlconsulting.com
Posts by Richard Vanhook
Dreamforce session: Using Code Share Projects in Force.com
Nov 26th
Richard Vanhook
If you’re planning on attending Dreamforce, I’ll be presenting features from apex-lang during the session “Using Code Share Projects in Force.com” and would love for you to be there. The session is during the last time slot (save the best for last right?) on Thursday, Dec 6 from 11am-12pm in the Force.com Theater.
Thankful for EDL Consulting
And while I’m on the subject of apex-lang, I’d like to thank Bill Loumpouridis and Craig Traxler at EDL for giving me the freedom and support to create apex-lang. I’ve used many open source projects and apex-lang is my way of giving back to the community. I recognize that other companies might not grant me that freedom and support and for that, I’m certainly thankful EDL Consulting. If you’re looking for a great place to work, look no further.
Template for Global Configuration Variables in Apex
Nov 26th
Richard Vanhook
Summary: This article discusses a pattern or template for enabling and customizing features in an application developed upon the Force.com platform.
Force.com and “configurability”: new expecations for developers
A great thing about developing on the Force.com platform is how configurable the product is out of the box. Need a new field on a screen? Easy, find the right page layout and modify it. Want a field to be required? Go find the field and make it required. It’s crazy easy. So easy in fact, that more and more folks can contribute to the solution of a system. Even folks without an IT background that 5-10 years ago would never make these types of configuration changes are doing it. Can you imagine Joe the BA adding an Oracle constraint to make a field required? Of course not.
The downside to this amazing “configurability” of the Force.com platform however, is it creates a disconnect between developers who are not used to including this level of configurability, and salesforce users who have grown to love this type of configuration and now expect it in anything associated with salesforce. Below I discuss a “global configuration variable” pattern that makes adding configurability to your solution simple, clean and reliable.
VisualForce HTML5 Template
Oct 25th
Richard Vanhook
Below is the simplest VisualForce page I’ve been able to construct that renders valid html5 markup (per http://html5.validator.nu). Controlling the exact output rendered by a VF page is tricky business; especially so for generating doctypes. The trick here is getting the page attributes right, using apex:outputText unescaped, and returning the doctype via a binding. I don’t think it matters from a validation perspective but a space unfortunately precedes the doctype declaration. If anyone know of an even simpler way to do this, please share! More >
Error Notifications in Apex
Oct 25th
Richard Vanhook
When an error occurs in any language or platform, it’s important to know (1) an issue even occurred and then (2) as much context regarding the error as possible. Curiously though, I’ve observed that most folks doing Apex development don’t build into their solution any error reporting. That’s a pretty big oversight in my opinion and in order to hopefully make it easier, I’ve attempted to create a really simple mechanism for reporting an error in Apex.
Faster VisualForce Translation
Feb 14th
Richard Vanhook
I’m generally not a Microsoft fan but the one tool I can’t live without is Excel. Sure Google has a spreadsheet app but it’s nowhere near as powerful as Excel, like not even in the same ballpark. As a Force.com developer, Excel is especially helpful in taking a VisualForce page which contains hard-coded text labels and converting those labels to use “Custom Labels”, a Force.com feature similar to J2EE Resource Bundles which enables a VisualForce page to be translated.
In this article, I’ll show you how to leverage Excel to more quickly translate a VisualForce page.