Migrating Existing Projects to Salesforce DX
Identifying conflicts with package folders during a Salesforce DX migration.
Blog
Lightning Components, Integers, & Script-Thrown Exceptions
Debugging a Lightning Component error when using Integers as server-side parameters.
Finding duplicate data with SOQL
Easy to remember query to identify duplicate data in a field.
Dreamforce 16 Session Recap
Recapping my Dreamforce 16 session and providing resources.
Catch Me At Dreamforce
I’m speaking at Dreamforce 2016 about Lightning Components & Community Builder.
Migrating Blog to Jekyll
It has been quite some time since I’ve last posted, but I’m back.
What is Salesforce?
Diving into Salesforce’s latest Trailhead module.
Salesforce Trailhead: Not Just For Beginners
How a seasoned Salesforce veteran can derive value from Trailhead.
2016: The Year of Quantifiable Goals
Now that 2015 has come to a close, it is an opportune time to think about my goals for the upcoming year. I did a pretty poor job of creating any sort of acc...
How I Migrated Off Meteor’s Free Hosting Plan
Over Thanksgiving I put some time into prototyping a small web application that I had been wanting to make for a few years, choosing the technology stack of ...
A Belated Dreamforce 2015
Don’t check your calendars – Dreamforce 2015 is over, and has been for a few weeks. Unfortunately what didn’t happen was a blog post highlighting the session...
First Look: Salesforce Files Connect
I’ve been working with a few clients who have expressed concern about the quantity of files they want to migrate into Salesforce and whether Salesforce Files...
Tips & Tricks for Building Hybrid Remote Mobile Apps using Salesforce Mobile SDK & Cordova
The Salesforce Mobile SDK is an extremely useful boilerplate for creating mobile apps on iOS and Android for Salesforce (and Windows now too); in fact, it is...
Salesforce Communities URL Endpoint with the Salesforce Mobile SDK & Xcode 6
Earlier this summer I was able to successfully (and quite easily) set up a hybrid_remote iOS application that pointed to a custom Salesforce community using ...
Preventing a Visualforce ActionFunction from Refreshing the Page
I came across a restriction the other day regarding the apex:actionFunction Visualforce component when I was trying to implement a to-do list that allowed a ...
Discovering Salesforce ContentDocumentLink ShareType Picklist Values
I recently was implementing some Apex code that required me to share Files with Users behind the scenes, which led me to the ContentDocumentLink object. It s...
Goal Accomplished: A Simple Native iOS App on the App Store called PaceMyRace
It’s been a long time coming, but I can finally check off Publish an iOS App off my list of goals for the year with the release of PaceMyRace. As mentioned r...
Salesforce Communities & the Live Agent Deployment API
Integrating Live Agent with Salesforce is exceptionally easy once you’ve purchased the licenses and followed the basic setup instructions. Peter Kno...
Building a Portable Bracing Table for Relief Carving
As I mentioned at the end of a post a couple weeks ago, I’ve been looking to put together some sort of system that allows me to more safely do relief carving...
Progress Report: Catching Up On My 2014 Goals
After writing my last post, I started to think back on the goals I had set up at the beginning of the year for myself. As with most people, my progress start...
First Attempt at Relief Carving in an Apartment
Getting back into woodworking has been one of my goals this calendar year. After 6 months of inactivity on that front, I finally decided to jump back in last...
My #salesforce1selfie Featured in a Salesforce eBook
This evening I found out that the #salesforce1selfie that I submitted as part of an earlier blog post, Building a Wellness Tracking App on Salesforce1 in a C...
Waze Observations & Tow Trucks
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but never got around to it. Back in April, we drove to Washington D.C. for a weekend trip. As part of the d...
Running Update: Vibram Fivefingers
A couple of months back I gave a quick update on my attempted transition to Vibram Fivefingers as my running shoe of choice. Unfortunately, I had a couple of...
Creating Morning Habits & Implicit vs. Explicit Journaling
This past weekend I came across a blog post from Steve Corona titled Morning Rituals – 1/10/100 that I found particularly motivating. In it he talked about o...
Building a Wellness Tracking App on Salesforce1 in a Couple Hours
A couple weeks back an internal team at 7Summits built a wellness tracking mobile application to help our staff compete against each other in a variety of we...
Setting up Rails Environment Variables with Foreman
When I started trying to learn Ruby on Rails, along with deploying my fun projects to Heroku, I ran into the issue of how to set environment variables locall...
Transitioning to Barefoot Running with Vibram Fivefingers
When I set a goal back at the beginning of the year to be more active, part of that goal was to get back to where I was when I was training for the marathon ...
Obligatory New Job Post: 7Summits
I’ve been a bit lazy on the blogging front lately, but I do have the exciting news that I recently joined a new company at the end of February, 7Summits! I’l...
A Better Way to Use Test.isRunningTest() in Apex
I haven’t leveraged Test.isRunningTest() in Apex, as I have yet to find a use case in my code where it was better to split up functionality to increase testa...
Salesforce.com Dynamic Apex Token Caching
I’ve started leveraging Dynamic SOQL for some different projects, one of which involved building a lighter weight version of the out of the box Workflow Rule...
Adding Standard Related Lists to a Different Object’s Page Layout
Recently I was asked whether it was possible to show the Notes & Attachments related list from one record on another record’s page layout. The caveat was...
Rails 4 Nested Object Creation and Parent Presence Validation Error
As I haven’t used Rails in a year or two (and even then, only a few small side projects to learn the language for fun) I tend to run across your typical “new...
Developing with JSON on the Salesforce.com Platform
As I work with different developers and existing Force.com implementations, I’ve come across quite a few implementations that leverage REST based 3rd party A...
Salesforce.com Advanced Developer (501) Programming Assignment & Essay
Back in August I posted about my takeaways from the Salesforce.com Advanced Developer (501) Certification‘s multiple choice exam. Since then, I completed the...
Building My First Google Chrome Extension for Salesforce
Building a Chrome Extension was never something I had considered. I’ve used plenty to enhance different applications that I use, but I never had stopped to t...
Salesforce.com Dynamic Apex Field Manipulation
I often get the idea that most people assume Apex is always strongly typed. However, you might not know that you can access fields on an sObject by using a d...
Hiding the Zemanta Related Posts WordPress Plugin Link
Back when I migrated my blog over to WordPress last year, I had read the tips about how you should set up links to other pages on your site in order to limit...
Customization of Salesforce.com Help Text Bubbles in Visualforce
Recently I had a few requests to add Salesforce’s help text bubbles to custom Visualforce pages, in places that did not have fields. Normally the only way yo...
Removing Labels from Visualforce Charting Pie Wedges
While leveraging Visualforce charting, I came across a few instances where I found that having the label of the wedges of a pie chart a bit off-putting. This...
New Year’s Resolutions for 2014
It has been a long time since I tried to come up with any sort of New Year’s Resolutions, but I think that this is a convenient time for me to put to paper s...
Towing 2.0: The Future of the Industry
Prior to moving to Chicago, I had never experienced the concept of being towed. I’m not talking about your car breaking down; I’m referring to the idea of yo...
Dreamforce & the Internet of Things
While attending Dreamforce 2013 I got my first real taste of the impending phenomenon that has been coined the Internet of Things from an enterprise / busine...
Why Salesforce Chatter Mobile Visualforce Publisher Actions are Unlocking Mobile for Everyone
Salesforce recently released an update to their Chatter Mobile application that I think has some major ramifications for those looking for low cost custom mo...
How to Create a Reusable Editable Table in Visualforce
One of the most frequent complaints that I hear from existing Salesforce users is the inability to quickly add, edit, or delete a group of records. The are a...
Focusing on the Right Goals
Over the last year, I’ve read quite a bit about bootstrapping smaller web applications and SaaS offerings. While I’ve found the information interesting, I’ve...
Visualforce PDF Table Cells and Mysterious Disappearing Borders
One of the coolest features of Visualforce (in my opinion) is the ability to render your page as a PDF. This has numerous use cases (including creating custo...
Salesforce.com Metadata API Error: Duplicates Value on Record with ID
While using the Force.com Migration Tool to migrate an entire organization’s changes to another, I ran into an issue with the Account object. I seem to have ...
Salesforce.com Metadata API Field Integrity Exception
The other day I was doing a coworker a favor by pushing up a bunch of changes from a Salesforce sandbox to production using the Migration Tool. I set up my p...
Salesforce.com Touch Customization Possibilities…are Limited
I spent some time investigating Salesforce’s Touch application (not to be confused with their Touch SDK) in an effort to understand how much we could leverag...
First Timer’s Experience at the 2013 US Open
Moving to New York City has opened up a lot of new opportunities to experience new things, the first being the NBA Draft this summer. The latest “New York” t...
Tips on Passing the Salesforce.com Advanced Developer (501) Certification Exam
Last week I passed the first part of the Salesforce Advanced Developer (501) Certification, which was a 69 question multiple choice exam that required a 73% ...
Salesforce.com: Introduction to the Ant Migration Tool
Working with Salesforce.com for the last few years, I’ve been lucky that I haven’t had to work with migrating changes between organizations often. For the mo...
Salesforce.com Permission Sets in Professional Edition
One of the major limitations of Salesforce.com Professional Edition is that there is no ability to customize Profiles, meaning that all of your users are stu...
Error Code 155037: Problem Switching from SVN 1.6.17 to 1.7.8 on OS X
Recently I noticed that Versions, the OS X specific visual SVN tool that I’ve used for many years (and love), was set to the check out repositories with 1.6....
Python Error: Conflicting Tk Libraries and ActiveTcl
The other day I ran across an issue running some python code on a Mac (OSX 10.8) in a virtual machine I had spun up solely for testing. This was the error I ...
First Wedding Anniverary: Origami Flowers in a Woodturned Vase
Many months ago (almost a year ago by now), Joyce and I had our first wedding anniversary. As the date approached, I had to determine what sort of gift I nee...
Confirming a User Really Wants to Leave a Page with JavaScript
Recently I needed to implement a solution that would stop users from leaving a pretty complex Visualforce form accidentally. The problem was that users would...
Working with SharePoint 2010 Web Services
Recently I have been leveraging SharePoint 2010’s Web Services from an external application (not on the Microsoft stack), and ran into a couple items that di...
Sending Visualforce Pages as Email Attachments in Salesforce
Recently I had to create a very complex Quoting mechanism in Salesforce that included a lot of custom product dependencies and limitations. In order to accom...
Getting Started with Mixpanel for Website Analytics
Probably the best part about playing around with building a web application for fun is that I get a chance to try out a lot of different technologies and pro...
Redirecting Blog Posts on a Subdomain to a Blog on the Main Domain using .htaccess
Back when I migrated over from Tumblr to WordPress, I also made the decision to switch my blog from http://blog.michaelwelburn.com to http://michaelwelburn.c...
Leveraging Redis with Ruby on Rails and Heroku
There are a lot of benefits to leveraging third party APIs to retrieve data that makes your application more valuable. In the case of Weather Wardrobe, I mak...
Blast from the Past
Back in 2008, I had the desire to start a blog, primarily due to a friend’s site. At that point, I had never written any web based code, CSS, javascript, etc...
Introducing Weather Wardrobe: The quickest way to get dressed in the morning
Many years ago (2008 to be precise), Joyce had the idea of a website that told her what to wear based on the weather. Over the years I’ve made a couple short...
iOS Development with Salesforce.com SDK: Day 1 thoughts
I finally began my first proof of concept leveraging a native iOS iPad application recently, which began with my attempts to recall basic pieces of architect...
New to iOS Programming
For a while now, I’ve wanted to learn iOS programming. It is easy to get caught up in some of the really neat applications available for iPhones and iPads an...
Salesforce.com APEX Sharing and Record Owners
Recently I ran into an error in a Salesforce.com trigger where I was creating APEX shares based on fields on the record in an organization with a private sec...
Migrating from Tumblr to WordPress
For a while now I’ve been wanting to move this blog from Tumblr to WordPress. I felt that WordPress allowed a lot more flexibility for me, and Tumblr felt a ...
Syncing Salesforce.com Data to an External System
I recently wrote a blog titled Our Story: Synchronizing the Sonoma Salesforce.com and MSCRM Dynamics Environments about an internal project that I did at wor...
Salesforce.com Data Loading options
I wrote a blog titled Loading or Manipulating Large Amounts of Data in Salesforce.com? Here’s Some Options! for my company, Sonoma Partners, regarding my exp...
Dropbox Selective Sync
I don’t think enough people know about Dropbox’s ability to do Selective Sync, so I thought I’d talk about how I use it.
HTTParty to the Rescue
Working with on Salesforce.com platform, part of my job ends up revolving around finding unique ways to solve coding limitations. Salesforce.com has a myriad...
Restaurant Review: Publican Quality Meats (Burger Night)
After a summer of declining invitations to Publican Quality Meats due to marathon training, I finally took advantage and went this past Tuesday (Burger Night...
Cooking: Oxtail Stew
After having oxtail at Avec a couple months ago, we were intrigued enough to try some more at home. After throwing around the idea, we decided on an oxtail s...
Restaurant Review: Elizabeth Restaurant
I had a chance to try out Elizabeth Restaurant in Lincoln Square Wednesday night, which has received a lot of great reviews on Yelp. My company included the ...
Chicago Marathon 2012: Completed
In a change from my futile attempts at web development blogging, I’ve decided to be more open ended in order to get more/any content up. First up on the age...
Creating a Login Form via Bootstrap Navbar Dropdown
Working on a new website for fun that leverages Twitter Bootstrap (until the day comes that I can do any of the UI myself), I recently decided to try to inte...
Setting Rails Environment Variables Outside of Version Control
UPDATE (4/8/2014): I’ve posted a newer blog post around using foreman as opposed to this method that alleviated an issue I was having with environment variab...
Comparing Weather APIs
I’ve been searching the internet recently for a comparison between all the major weather APIs for a side project. Unfortunately, there isn’t much out ther...
The Beginning
Hopefully this space will be used to document any future projects and random tidbits that get learned from them, though likely will mix in some random other ...