The Spring 16 release contains a ‘fix’ for a problem that IMHO does not exist.

update: the link to help and training above now pulls up a blank article. google’s cache shows the article describing the ‘fix’. Perhaps a change is in the air.

Prior to spring16, read access to a contact was sufficient for a user to add the contact to a campaign. So you could have a public read-only or private contact sharing model, while allowing users to add any contacts they could see to campaigns.

Apparently that was a problem. So, the ‘fix’ was to automatically hide the add to campaign button unless the user has edit on the record. However, as this is not enforced on list views or reports, if that is a serious security issue, then its not really fixed. Regardless, this quickly started to cause me problems. It started with increasing support requests from users, and soon I was resorting to adding...

There is a great app called FieldTrip that will let you know which fields are actually populated in records, but deep diving into eclipse, or using brute force, have been the only way that I am aware of to see which ones are actually visible on which page layout.

Until now. By using workbench.developerforce.com to retrieve the page layout metadata, along with OpenRefine to parse the XML to a spreadsheet, it becomes ridiculously easy to pull out this information.

Update: the most awesome and powerful Amber Boaz pointed me at an app called ‘cloud config’ that lets you export all your metadata info to excel, including layouts. Its awesome and definitely has a place in the admins toolkit. Using refine as described in this post makes it ridiculously easy to compare field visibility across layouts, and do other fun things, so these are definitely complementary options.

So, to pull this...

** RATHER UNFORTUNATE UPDATE - NOV 2018**
Did some sleuthing and discovered that geocodes bug out sometimes when there is something like a room number that data.com doesnt like in the street address (even though the address is valid, the google map component in sfdc shows the address properly, and there is a valid city state and zip that could be used).

Ran the gauntlet and got a known issue logged for it…odds of it ever being fixed == low. (UPDATE: NEVER)

So This mostly makes geocodes somewhat less useful. You will need to run a report to see records that have an address but no geocode, to see which ones are being skipped, and then manually tweak them until the data.com gremlins are satisfied with your efforts.

UPDATE JAN 2018
many of the old links dont work, and there is not a lot of documentation i could find. here are a couple of links from the release notes to get...

Including case comments in the case assignment email allows the recipient to see exactly what is going on before even logging in to Salesforce.

You need a visualforce email template for this. You can use an apex:repeat component in your email template, but there is no sort order on those. Really, as best as I can find, its just random.

So I went ahead and created a custom component to select comments and sort. Now i can include just the last 3 comments to keep it simple, and its sorted by date, with most recent first.

Credit: This StackExchange post was hugely helpful in making this happen

I altered the solution a bit to use an apex:repeat in a table in the custom component, instead of a datalist, as i found the formatting better. The code for controller, component, test class, and vf email template is all copied below for your pleasure.

controller

public class

While permission sets makes assigning permissions a breeze, it can be a bit of a bear to audit all 150 of them. By audit, i mean see which ones give you [some permission] on [some object]

So this blog post will cover a number of ways to audit permission sets, and specifically will go into details on how to audit record type access using the metadata api, as that is the only way that I could find. Note that this would work for profiles or permission sets.

Now the first place to go is to use the list view itself. You can display and edit CRED permissions for any object on a permission set list view, just like you can with profiles. And that means you can edit them all at once (up to 200 at a time).

So, if you want to see which permission sets give Delete access on accounts, that is the first place to go. Just note that the search functionality for setting the ‘filter criteria’ is...

When a user is deactivated, we want to notify their manager to review the records that the User owns, to determine which ones should be transferred and which ones can be left alone.

With Spring 15, most any user can edit a record owned by an inactive user so it makes sense to review and leave them alone unless someone is taking over the relationship / opportunity.

So, we pulled together a workflow rule that triggers an email to manager
that shows a count of records owned by user, and links to reports where they can view records.

The email uses a visualforce email template, with a custom component that calculates the number of records owned by the user, and includes a link to reports that are filtered by the UserID, so it shows the actual records owned by the user.

Note: reports must filter on 18 character ID - as that is what the component delivers, since its running in code.

I’m...

These are looking like the best thing since flows themselves…so many use cases i can think of, primarily for onboarding new users, but also for announcements, tips / tricks, and complex authentication protocols.

User login flows came out in Spring 15, and they let you present the user with a flow, between them entering their password, and getting full access to Salesforce. And, you can send the user down different paths based on really anything - profile, role, last login date, some value in a custom setting, the time of day, the value of salesforce stock, whatever you can think of, is really powerful.

So after this screen, you can do, or have the user do…whatever you want.

For example…

Clicking next / finish takes the user to Salesforce - and you can customize the flow finish location if you desire!

In this article, I will present an overview of a login flow, which present...

I recently had a global action that I wanted to display on the home page, but not on object detail pages. It looked like I would have to add this action to the global publisher layout, and then override the publisher layouts on all objects in order to remove it from objects. This would have been a ton of work and was clearly not worth it. However, in digging into it, we found that there is a way to configure that separately, that is not to my knowledge documented.

First a bit of an overview on chatter publishers and where they are configured.

There are 4 chatter publishers that can be configured.

• Home page
• Record detail pages
• Chatter profile
• Chatter groups

By default, all of these publishers display the Actions that are set in the Global Publisher Layout assigned to the users profile.

To customize this layout, go to setup - create - global actions - publisher layouts

And...

UPDATE - 7.7.15: This will eventually trigger an error and is now a known issue, with expected behavior listed as “TBD”. So as I expected, its not known whether this will be a supported use case or not. Using a fast lookup / update this will run about 30 times before failing, using a regular lookup / update will run about 90 times before failing. Use at your own risk, but its still pretty damn cool.

In a previous post I provided a proof-of-concept for a simple flow that posts to chatter every hour, forever, on an opportunity. Will call that version A.

I have iterated to demonstrate a version with controls (Version B), so it fires on a recurring basis as long as the opportunity is open. From there, I have created a version (Version C) that waits for last modified date, thereby only posting if the record has been modified within the given time period.

Version B of the flow consists...

UPDATE - 7-7-15: This will eventually trigger an error, and is a known issue w expected behavior ‘TBD’. See updated post - Infinite Flow Refined. for more details on the error and the infinite flow model

It is possible to set up a recurring event (say a birthday reminder that fires every year) using 2 workflow rules. Its not all that pretty, but it works.

There are open ideas for recurring time based rules, including one that was marked as delivered in spring 15 via process builder.

I set about trying to build such functionality using process builder, and had a hard time getting it to work as there are a lot of options to poke around with, its hard to debug processes, and so on.

Since process builder on the back end spits out a flow, I thought I might have better luck there, and indeed I did. So I shall demonstrate how to build a flow that continues, forever.

Sample use case...