| Recent Blog Posts |
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sfdx-l18n-plugin
Thu, Sep 14th 2017 1:35p Mikkel Heisterberg
Today I've published my first plugin to the SalesforceDX CLI. The plugin is called sfdx-l18n-plugin and allows you to change localisation settings for the user in the scratch org you create. You can query the current values, list the available values from the org and set new values. The plugin can return values in plaintext or as JSON for automation. Changing the org to run in Japanese using Japanese locale and the timezone from Tokyo is as easy as:
sfdx l18n:user:set -u japanese --locale ja_J |
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The best way to learn a platform is to use a platform
Fri, Aug 11th 2017 3:06p Mikkel Heisterberg
Wow what a week it's been. First week back from vacation and I'm diving right into a sprint of stuff that needs to be delivered to the customer. My task for the week has been develop a connectivity layer between Salesforce and Dropbox using OAuth. This task has taken me on quite a learning journey.
Now I'll call myself quite a seasoned programmer but ever since joining Salesforce 9 months ago I've had to relearn a lot of stuff. A new programming language in Apex, new framework technologies |
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Flip Chrome flag to easily inspect TLS certificates (from Chrome 60)
Tue, Aug 8th 2017 10:57a Mikkel Heisterberg
As a developer - or a security conscious user - you may want to inspect TLS certificates from time to time. However inspecting them in Chrome is hard as access to the certificate hierarchy dialog has been tucked away in the Developer Tools. Happily Chrome 60 has added a flag to add an easy to reach option back to the TLS dropdown in Chrome.
Please note that manually editing Chrome browser flags may mess up your browser - don't say I didn't warn you...
In the below video I show you how... |
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Developing Salesforce Lightning Components that are visible at design time but not at runtime
Thu, Jun 29th 2017 7:48p Mikkel Heisterberg
So this can clearly be labelled as a "Lightning Lesson from the Field". As you start to develop more complicated Salesforce Lightning applications - and why wouldn't you - you as I have done start seeing great power in hidden components. By hidden components I mean components that contribute code or does "something" but which does not have a UI. Thes are very easy to do but have a big drawback as they are also invisible at design time making them near impossible to find the Lightning AppBui |
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Deploy your own Salesforce Workbench on Heroku at the click of a button
Thu, Jun 22nd 2017 8:07a Mikkel Heisterberg
The other day Salesforce Workbench was having issues. Generally it kept returning errors and SOQL queries took forever and timed out. Now Salesforce Workbech is a LAMP app that runs on Heroku and it turns out it is actually possible to deploy your own instance on Heroku using a simple Heroku Button. To do this simply follow the below steps (you need to have an account but if you don't simply sign up):
Go to the project page at https://elements.heroku.com/buttons/jdrishe/salesforce-workbench
Cl |
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Currency conversion in Apex
Tue, Jun 20th 2017 7:56p Mikkel Heisterberg
While waiting for my flight in the lounge tonight I was playing around with currencies in Salesforce because - why not... Conversion between configured currencies are supported in SOQL and Salesforce but only between the configured corporate currency and the users personal currency. But what if you want to convert between an opportunity amount in one currency and into another currency using the configured conversion rates in Salesforce? Well there is no support for this. So as an Apex / SOQL sel |
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Simplifying usage of Salesforce Lightning Design System using NPM and Express
Wed, Jun 14th 2017 12:36p Mikkel Heisterberg
Using Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS) is a great and easy way to add some super nice styling to your app. It comes with some nice defaults and a responsive grid system like other frameworks lige Bootstrap. Where SLDS really shines is of course if you are already using Salesforce (I assume you're already on Lightning right?!!?!?) or if you are going to. And again who isn't. Anyways... Using SLDS makes your apps really look like Salesforce which is nice for Salesforce Lightning Compone |
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Salesforce week 25-27 and finishing this weekly thing...
Mon, May 22nd 2017 6:38a Mikkel Heisterberg
Wow!! A half year has gone by. Half a year... Where did the time go? Over the last weeks I've gradually noticed that my view on being with Salesforce has shifted from being "something new" to being "how things are". On feeling at home in the organisation and that I know my place. Does new things come up sure but it's feeling less and less like every day brings something new, a new badge or a new process. I've settled into the #Ohana. This is also why I've decided to stop writing these we |
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Salesforce Lightning Component API change
Wed, May 17th 2017 9:49a Mikkel Heisterberg
As we get closer to Summer 17 we start using difference versions across production instances and sandboxes. This of course also leads to opportunities for differences in API's... I just found one such difference as I'd been developing some Lightning components on Summer 17 and got errors when trying to run them on Spring 17. In Summer 17 you can do the following in a client-side event handler to get the DOM element of the source component:
({
react: function(component, event, helper) {
cons |
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component.find woes in Salesforce Lightning
Tue, May 2nd 2017 2:59p Mikkel Heisterberg
When developing Salesforce Lightning Components you very often use the aura:id attribute on components to tag them and component.find to find them again. This works very well and is documented nicely in the documentation (Finding Components by ID). If however you tag a component using aura:id in an iterator you may not know how many resulting components will be on the page. The component.find method may return undefined (if no matching components), a component instance (if a single match was fou |
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! vs # in Salesforce Lightning Components
Mon, May 1st 2017 1:00p Mikkel Heisterberg
Often when you read tutorials on developing Salesforce Lightning components they all contains expressions when passing data and variables into other components. Like say you have an attribute as an array and would like to iterate over the elements:
{!item}
Now this is a very simple example but it shows the point. This component shows a simple bullet list with items - when the array attribute ("arr") changes the list will recalculate and update. Often this is what you want but sometime |
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Salesforce week 24
Mon, May 1st 2017 7:02a Mikkel Heisterberg
Last week was all about getting the next component for my customer into production. For one of their business lines they had some very specific requirements for a search so we built a search from scratch. Now Salesforce comes with a built in fulltext search functionality but the customer only wanted results from a specific object type and a specific record type at that. So that's what we built. The solution was deployed on Thursday and have been running since. Main hickup in the deployment was |
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Salesforce week 20-23
Fri, Apr 21st 2017 12:45p Mikkel Heisterberg
Wow I'm behind on these... I'll have to sum up the last 4 weeks and get better at doing these.
At the end of March I made Trailhead Ranger! I'm very happy that the ambitious goal of making Trailhead Ranger by the end of March was accomplished. On the Wednesday night in the bar of my second home (Radisson Hotel in Stockholm) I earned the last badges to bring me over the line. Great! I hurried over to my V2MOM to complete that measure on my FY18 V2MOM. Check! Next up is getting started on my |
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Case in point - why we have API limits
Wed, Apr 5th 2017 5:24a Mikkel Heisterberg
This week the customer I'm working for went live with the next phase of their Salesforce rollout. The phase includes a Contact Sychronization feature where Salesforce contact objects are synchronized to users mobile devices using their Google Account. The contacts are flagged either in bulk or specifically using a Lightning Component on the Contact Page, has Salesforce1 integration to allow users to perform and manage sync on the go as well as a delegation feature to allow other users to manage |
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Salesforce week 19
Wed, Mar 29th 2017 7:57p Mikkel Heisterberg
Another busy week where all focus was on getting our customer ready for the launch of their next release on 3 April. Again I've been a bit optimistic about my estimates but all it good and the customer is happy. They just signed an extension to our contract so we will probably be here until the end of the year. Great testament to the value we are providing. Next week I'm going to be two days in Stockholm and 3 days the following week in the week of the release. After that we have a short sprin |
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Salesforce week 18
Fri, Mar 24th 2017 8:40a Mikkel Heisterberg
This week marked my 4th month at Salesforce! That's so crazy. 4 months already - where did the time go? Joining Salesforce was a big decision and since I joined the time has flown by. It has taken some time but I'm starting to feel at home in my new role in CSG here at Salesforce. As always change is hard and a change of job is no different. Well it's probably hard for me to say that as this is the first "real" job I've had as I've been self employed / co-owner of the company I've worked |
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Using preformatted HTML in a Salesforce Lightning Component
Fri, Mar 24th 2017 8:26a Mikkel Heisterberg
Had to output preformatted HTML richtext from a richtext field in a Lighting Component the other day. Looking through the documentation I found the ui:outputRichText component but it didn't really work the way it's mentioned in the documentation. Instead of the body of the tag containing the HTML the HTML had to be in the value-attribute as shown below.
The "bio" CSS class I added is to actually apply the formatting I need. Although the HTML contains the HTML tags the CSS on the Lighting |
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Salesforce Lightning Components and image dependencies
Mon, Mar 20th 2017 9:51p Mikkel Heisterberg
I am developing some Salesforce Lightning components at the moment as while Lightning Components are great they have a major drawback in my mind. Some background first... Salesforce Lightning is our "new" component based UI based on HTML / Javascript and components are automatically mobile ready and responsive. A Lightning Component is not a single "thing" but rather a folder with stuff that is a number of files named using a predefined format. The component name is the name of the folder - |
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Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS) Activity Component and z-index
Mon, Mar 20th 2017 9:05p Mikkel Heisterberg
For the Lightning Components I'm developing for a customer I'm using the activity timeline component to show a chronologic timeline of "stuff". However when I added the markup to my Lightning Component and ran it inside Salesforce the vertical bars were missing. What to do? Crack open the Chrome Developer Tools and inspect - but hey! Then the bars were there... Close Developer Tools and the bars were gone again. Hmmm... Seems to be a viewport height issues. But then again not...
After qui |
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Salesforce week 17
Fri, Mar 17th 2017 9:13a Mikkel Heisterberg
Boy a busy week and the following as well. So much that I didn't have time to write this post. Will try and sum up for week 18.
What did I learn
Blogging takes time...
Status after this week
Trailhead points: 80150
Trailhead badges: 82
Certifications: 5 (Salesforce Certified Administrator, Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder, Salesforce Certified Advanced Administrator, Salesforce Certified Sales Cloud Consultant, Salesforce Certified Service Cloud Consultant) |
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Salesforce week 16
Mon, Mar 6th 2017 9:09a Mikkel Heisterberg
Week 16 brought my first full week budgeted at my customer and I was asked if I wanted to stay on for the rest of the year. I said "yes please!" and take it both as a pat on back for work well done as well a encouragement that I'm definitely heading in the right direction. The night I spent in Stockholm was spent on Trailhead as I really want to make Ranger. Ranger is awarded when one has earned 50k points and 100 badges. I'm well beyond the 50k points but need 20 more badges. I'm making a |
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Salesforce week 15
Sun, Feb 26th 2017 8:17p Mikkel Heisterberg
A week with two days of travel although not going to Stockholm for a change. This weeks trip brought me to Amsterdam and our Regional Kickoff for the EMEA North region. First day was breakout sessions for the various divisions and then drinks and dinner. Day 2 was the main regional kickoff and after a mindfulness session and group massage we got started. All good fun, good information an a nice place to meet new people and colleagues. Only drawback was the hallways of the venue where the noice l |
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Salesforce week 14
Sun, Feb 19th 2017 7:33p Mikkel Heisterberg
Short week as I had Thursday and Friday off - or PTO as we call vacation. But a great week. Monday and Tuesday I spent on-site in Stockholm and Monday night I finally got my act together and took the final certification exam of my onboarding and I'm very happy to report that I passed. Yay!! I now have passed all the 5 certifications I needed to pass. #happyDays
It was also my first week of being billable at the customer which was great. Wednesday was spent in the home office. All good stuff! |
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Salesforce week 13
Mon, Feb 13th 2017 7:44p Mikkel Heisterberg
Last week I spent two days at the customer site in Stockholm and 3 days at home in the home office. I think. Cannot really remember. Maybe I was in the office one of the days. Oh well :) It's starting to become normal to go to Stockholm and family life and work life is starting to work out. It seems like it will work for us. Customer project wise I almost finished the Lightning Component I've been working on for the customer and even made small changes to also make it work in Salesforce1. With |
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Salesforce for Newcomers - Introduction to orgs, sandboxes, API login and Salesforce security
Fri, Feb 10th 2017 8:24a Mikkel Heisterberg
As I venture into the Salesforce Universe myself there are many areas that I would have wished had been easier to figure out. So what better than remedying that with a series of blog posts. Maybe there will be one post and maybe more. We'll see... This first instalment is on some of the basics in Salesforce namely the org, sandboxes and some of the security implications of logging in. I'm pretty technical so some of this will be from a technical angle so please forgive me and stay with me.
" |
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Lightning Components as Quick Actions in Salesforce1 and padding
Wed, Feb 8th 2017 7:05p Mikkel Heisterberg
Since Winter 17 we have had the option of using a Using Lightning Component as a Quick Action. In the Lightning Experience in a desktop browser the component is shown as a popup (actually a lightbox) in the UI and in Salesforce1 (the Salesforce mobile app) it's more of a modal fullscreen dialog. All this is great. Only thing you have to do is to make your component implement force:lightningQuickAction (all declaratively) and it can be added as a Quick Action. The resulting lightbox / dialog wil |
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Salesforce Platform Cache
Mon, Feb 6th 2017 9:48a Mikkel Heisterberg
Stumbled over the Salesforce Platform Cache the other day and just discovered this nice Trailhead Module on it (Platform Cache Basics). Worth 30 minutes if you're developing on the platform. |
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Salesforce week 12
Mon, Feb 6th 2017 8:31a Mikkel Heisterberg
Week 12 brought me to Stockholm for 3 days, had 1 day in our new shiny Salesforce office in Hellerup (closer to Copenhagen center) and 1 day working from home. I spent most of the week getting up to speed on Salesforce Lightning and developing mockups for a custom component for the customer. All in all it was a great week where I learned a lot and made significant contribution to the customer project although I'm not officially assigned and billable yet (I'm shadowing).
Salesforce Lightning |
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Salesforce week 11
Tue, Jan 31st 2017 5:21p Mikkel Heisterberg
First week on "the job" brought me to the customer I'll most likely be assigned to in Stockholm. I spent Tuesday to Thursday there and have already delivered something that will go into production in a couple of weeks. Both exciting and scary... The week was basically spent learning about the project, the phases, deliverables and a whole slew of new terminology. All good stuff. Nothing much else to report for now besides Stockholm being a nice city.
What did I learn
Some customers actually |
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Salesforce username/password OAuth flow against a sandbox
Tue, Jan 31st 2017 8:29a Mikkel Heisterberg
We had issues today because our OAuth password flow wouldn't work against one of our sandboxes although the code worked against production. Instead we got this error:
{"error":"invalid_grant","error_description":"authentication failure"}
After Googling and finding this thread it turned out that when using the username/password flow against a sandbox you have to either relax IP restrictions for login or authenticate against test.salesforce.com instead of login.salesforce.com (which of |
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Arlanda Express app
Mon, Jan 30th 2017 10:23a Mikkel Heisterberg
These weeks - and probably through the end of the year - I'm going quite a lot to Stockholm so like any respectable geek I'm trying my best to make my travels more productive and easier to manage. Flying is easy - booking is all online and trips, boarding cards and receipts are managed entirely mobile. Easy. Next was hotels - also easy using existing apps except for the actual check in process.
This Monday I found the Arlanda Express app. Excellent!! Tickets are bought and paid in the app u |
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Quick CLI aliases for Salesforce instance info
Wed, Jan 25th 2017 9:50p Mikkel Heisterberg
Today when at a customer we were trying to figure out the release versions the various sandboxes and development environments and compare this info with the version of the production instance. Of course all this is available from status.salesforce.com but clicking around got a bit tedious so I whipped up a quick set of bash aliases for the Terminal. Since the output is also available as JSON it was pretty easy. First I grabbed the jq JSON parser for bash and then I wrote 4 aliases for bash:
sf_ |
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Salesforce week 10
Wed, Jan 25th 2017 7:25p Mikkel Heisterberg
Week 10 it all started to get real... All in all my last quiet week. I actually met my manager in person (she's based in Amsterdam) and I spent more time playing with the Salesforce platform with a specific focus on Service Cloud, Lightning and Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS). I also got my first customer project in Stockholm which will be fun. With the planning on my first customer visits came fun experiments planning flights, hotels etc. All good fun.
What did I learn
Service Clo |
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Salesforce week 7-9
Wed, Jan 25th 2017 7:18p Mikkel Heisterberg
Wow! Time is starting to fly by. Week 7 I took vacation and relaxed by taking time off between Christmas and New Years. I got back into the office on Tuesday following New Years Eve and promptly started studying for my Salesforce bootcamp. The bootcamp is in San Francisco and I spent all of week 7 preparing and studying for that. We are very much into gamification as is obvious if you've ever visited Trailhead. I flew off to San Francisco on Friday and spent all of Saturday and Sunday settling |
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.gitignore for MavensMate
Mon, Jan 9th 2017 12:02a Mikkel Heisterberg
Note to self... Exclude the workspace and project files as well as /config from Git so a .gitignore file should be something iike this:
*-project
*-workspace
config
So in bash something like:
$ echo *-workspace > .gitignore
$ echo *-project >> .gitignore
$ echo config >> .gitignore |
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Salesforce week 6
Mon, Dec 26th 2016 9:38p Mikkel Heisterberg
Again study, study, study... Since last week I completed 2 certifications which takes me to 4 of the 5 I need. The last is Certified Salesforce Service Cloud Consultant which is looking pretty tricky but I have to find some material on the exam. Did my second round of volunteering - felt good. Closing off the year having volunteered 13 hours. Okay I think. Looking into how I can help for a Salesforce project in Africa. Interesting.
From here on it's xmas, then new years and it's time to thin |
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Salesforce week 5
Sun, Dec 18th 2016 8:05p Mikkel Heisterberg
All (well most) of this week was spent - you guessed it! - studying for exams... I tried to take the Salesforce Certified Advanced Admin on Wednesday but due to hickups in the system at Webassessor I had to exit the exam and the new time slot I got I couldn't do. So the exam is now scheduled for Monday. It's going to be exciting. Whether I pass or not I'm at the point where I need to see some actual questions to gauge what they are asking for instead of simply trying to guess. My take on exam |
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Inspecting Force.com IDE traffic
Tue, Dec 13th 2016 9:21a Mikkel Heisterberg
For my studies for the Certified Salesforce Advanced Admin I needed to understand the various code deployment options for the force.com platform including the Force.com IDE based on Eclipse. Installing the IDE was pretty straight forward and creating a force.com project and adding an APEX trigger was likewise easy. As I like to understand what's going on under the covers I went to inspect the traffic but of course everything is encrypted using TLS so I went to my favorite tool for these kinds o |
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Salesforce week 4
Sun, Dec 11th 2016 9:02p Mikkel Heisterberg
It's been another week of training, training, training. I've watched a LOT of video and started the week studying for the AppBuilder certification only to find out that maybe Certified Advanced Admin was a better place to go after Certified Admin. So Wednesday or so I rebooted and refocused on that certification which really has set me a while back on making another cert by this week or early next week. We'll have to see how it goes. This week I made a new level on Trailhead and I'm now at t |
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Salesforce week 3
Sun, Dec 4th 2016 8:24p Mikkel Heisterberg
I spent 2 days in Stockholm at the Nordic Winter Summit. The summit gathered all of Salesforce from Denmark, Sweden and Finland (no Norway office yet) for two days of get together. It was 2 very nice days hearing about that went down the last year, what's on the top of the agenda currently and what's the plan for the next year. We heard about some of the great volunteering that's being done by Salesforce employees across the Nordics and what cool new customers we have. We also saw demos of so |
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Salesforce week 2
Sun, Nov 27th 2016 11:43p Mikkel Heisterberg
So another week went and passed. I got my phone number ported and I'm now fully setup technology wise. I spent the entire week reading, reading, reading getting ready for my first certification which is a Salesforce Certified Administrator. Aiming to take it Monday or Tuesday this week. I've used both the online courses from the Salesforce help but also a lot of Trailhead. I like the latter much more as it validates the assignments you complete in a training org. The online courses are just do |
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Salesforce week 1
Sun, Nov 20th 2016 8:37p Mikkel Heisterberg
So that was week 1. I started with Salesforce on Tuesday and I'm up and running with my new MacBook Pro and a new phone. Well I'm not actually using my new phone as I'm porting my old number over to Salesforce but it should be ported by Thursday next week. IT wise everything is pretty smooth and between TechForce and Concierge (IT helpdesk and IT self-service) it was very easy. Everything here is done in the cloud if possible and everything is using SAML and/or two factor auth. Either using Y |
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JSONata looks very nice
Mon, Nov 14th 2016 12:44p Mikkel Heisterberg
While JSON is a very nice and concise data format it lacks the structure and query capabilities of XML and XPath. Often times querying JSON leads to line on line of code to do proper error checking and retrieve the proper value and - if need be - a default value. Meet JSONata! JSONata is a query language plus so much more. I invite you to look at the slides from the recent IBM tech talk on the matter or visit the JSONata Exerciser to try it out.
JSONata is also available as a NPM module. |
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Simple speedtest app deployed using heroku
Sat, Nov 12th 2016 10:43a Mikkel Heisterberg
My parents mobile broadband connection in their summer house seemed a little flaky and my father asked me how we could monitor it. Easy I thought. I would simply grab a Raspberry pi and one of the available tools so I googled and found a nice tutorial. Getting it to work was easy enough but after having this run for a few days the results were weird and didn't match what we saw while there. So what do any self-respecting programmer do? Write his/her own of course... :)
So I broke out my langu |
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Adding a new git remote to an existing project
Sat, Nov 12th 2016 10:16a Mikkel Heisterberg
Today I had a project that I already had in git and I had an existing remote I had already pushed to. Now I wanted to add github as well so I added the repo on github and initialized the repo with a README.mf and a LICENSE file. After adding the remote to the local repo and attempting to pull from it I got the following error:
fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories
Apparent the way the merge command work has been changed in git v. 2.9 to make sure you do not mix histories by accident. To |
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Revisiting my decrease in blogging year over year
Sat, Nov 12th 2016 9:36a Mikkel Heisterberg
Almost 4 years ago I posted about my decrease in blogging year over year (Decrease in blogging year over year - is it a problem?) and thought it would be interesting to revisit the subject. For one because I've actually blogged more this year than in previous years and because I'll be moving to a new technology and I suspect blogging will increase. |
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It's time for something new - I'm joining Salesforce.com
Tue, Nov 1st 2016 3:55p Mikkel Heisterberg
I'm writing this not sure who - if any - will ever read this. Sometimes writing is like therapy and can help you get on and move on. So - dear IntraVision - I'm leaving you. It's not you. It's me.
It's with both a heavy heart and tremendous excitement I'm finally posting this. As of November 14 I'm closing a big chapter in my life and career by leaving IntraVision. It has been a difficult decision and not one I've taken lightly but I decided it was time to step out of the shadows of ye |
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Minimal web.xml for authenticated webapp on WAS 8.5.5.x
Mon, Oct 17th 2016 9:09a Mikkel Heisterberg
I was doing a simple servlet based web application that should on WebSphere Application Server 8.5.5.6 the other day. The servlet should require authentication. I really wanted to avoid using web.xml and go annotation based but it turned out that it wasn't possible - at least for me. Servlets are secured using the @ServletSecurity and you specify required role(s) and HTTP constraints e.g. is HTTPS required etc.
I added the following annotations:
@WebServlet(urlPatterns={"/"}, initParams={ |
2017-03-06 09:00:02 Failed to parse RSS file. (Invalid character at line 30, column 349). 