I  get asked quite a bit what song is coming next. I’ve helped others write several parodies of existing songs and while I don’t generally perform the parodies, here is a list of what I have coming up next. I may or may not be performing them on my own, but we’ll see:

Top 5 Salesforce parodies in the works:

5) You’ll Be a Closed Opp Soon (Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon)

4) Valdiation Rules (California Girls — Katy Perry)

3) Ben-i-off (Shake it Off — Taylor Swift)

2) I Only Added One More Rule (Only Wanna Be with You — Hootie & the Blowfish)

1) It’s Friday, Lets Deploy (It’s Friday I’m in Love — The Cure)

I was so excited to do the It’s Friday, Let’s Deploy that I couldn’t wait to do it, so without further delay: enjoy!

:wq!

Last Thursday I was met with some very good news. I am now a Salesforce MVP, class of Spring ’15!

I think its all still settling in but wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who nominated me. I’d like to thank the current MVPs who were part of the process as well, if it weren’t for the encouragement of my MVP mentor Vamsi Krishna, and other MVPs who were there as a sounding board for me (Bill Greenhaw, Sarah Deutsch, Brian Kwong to name a few) I’m sure I’d not have had the chance to have this experience.

Its very humbling. I interact with a number of superstars in this community who are certainly MVP material and here I am — one of them. There truly are not words to fit the occasion. (Actually, there *are* some words, but I’m still putting them together).

Now I must ask you all for a favor: If there’s something I can do to help give back, something you’d like to see me try (e.g. put together a blog post about a specific topic, maybe even speak on a certain topic perhaps — which scares the bajeeezus outta me), anything I can do, please let me know. Hit me up on twitter, even facebook, email, here in the comments, smoke signals, whatever — I’m here. I don’t like to make it obvious, even downplay it a bit at times, but I LOVE interacting with the community, so don’t be shy :)

Again 1000 times thank you!!

:wq!

Recently I was asked a question to describe what exemplified me as a coder, preferably with an example of code. It was odd, not something I’ve ever really thought about. I write code and attempt to leverage the pluses of a given framework and work around the minuses. I don’t have one “goto algorithm” for sorting things, or a given methodology that could be described in words let alone code, so I got to thinking, and thinking, and thinking. All I came up with was one simple rule: “Write easily digested code.”

I’ll be straight, I’m 40 years old, been in IT for over 20 years, and I’ve not the time nor desire for flexing my coding muscles by showing of my implementation of  the “modified pre-order tree traversal” algorithm. I’m not gunning for a job at Google, or looking to be a star on Top Coder, etc. I’m here to “get shit done” in a sensible, maintainable, and easy to understand way. Perhaps its my python background that taught me that there is elegance in simplicity and much value to be had in explicit versus implicit code. Sometimes that may seem like the long way around but in the end, even the most “showy” of developers wind up appreciating something simple. We stare at problems all day, one of those problems need not be deciphering someone else’s “mental inspirations” in their code.

MOST of us aren’t coding to save lives, put someone on the moon, or write high performance platform games. MOST of us don’t have to worry about the “Big O” of a given algorithm. I save that for the people *way* smarter than I am. I rarely have to dust that sort of skill set off and when I do, you can be darn sure I will have no less than 22 tabs open in Google walking me through it.

At the end of the day, when I move on in this world, whether figuratively or otherwise, I want whomever inherits my code to not have to sit back and scratch their head, or re-read a section of code over and over to make heads or tails of it.

I’ve talked about writing clean code before, but this goes even beyond that a little bit. Its really one of those things that are hard to talk about until you’ve seen it. I’m always striving to make my code simple to comprehend, but not just by seasoned programmers but by the young intern that’s gonna be inheriting your code someday.

I’m not exactly sure the person I was talking to was pleased with my answer, it was probably nowhere near academic enough to hold their interest and probably seemed like a cop-out. It may be a cop-out to them but for me, its sort of turned into a mantra: “Write simple and easily ‘ingestable’ code”

:wq!

It’s that time of year again. No, not the time to spend money on cheesy I love you cards, and calorie filled fake chocolates…I mean its time to nominate your Salesforce Community Heroes for MVP status! I’ve cast my vote(s) for some very deserving folks. Nomination is very important. Its well within your control to see the community become what you want/need it to become by selecting those you want to see help drive the passion behind the community! So what are you waiting for…just do it!

Having trouble choosing? Not sure what makes a good MVP? I’ve talked about here before.

:wq!

Sometimes your users need to send an email from within Salesforce. Most of the time the standard Send Email button will suffice. Other times however, your needs are more specific. For those times, developers often resort to using Visualforce email templates which can certainly meet just about any need. However, the drawback here is that the email content now lives in code. Being good developers, we don’t want our admins to have to worry about digging into code for things like this — unless they really want to — so we try to come up with a way to make the content of the email accessible. This was my exact requirement and here’s what I wound up doing. The code herein is very specific to the requirement in question but could be generalized a bit to make it more flexible or reusable (which is something I may just do at some point, but alas — deadlines. @Codefriar has already done some pretty cool stuff here.).

Here was my approach:

The Template:

I created a new Email Template just as one would for use in workflow email alerts etc. I then created a custom settings to store the ID of this email template in this particular application’s custom settings. I will use this ID later to get the ID of this template in my apex class.  In the content of this email I included the merge field syntax (more or less because it was familiar to people) for the fields that I knew I was going to be including later.  In the end I wound up with a template that looked something like this (any client identifiable content has been replaced with BLAH BLAH BLAH — I’m so creative…):

Dear {!Contact.Salutation} {!Contact.LastName},
I am pleased to attach the final BLAH BLAH BLAH document between {!Opportunity.Account} and the BLAH BLAH BLAH for your records.

BLAH BLAH BLAH is proud to work with {!businessTypePlural} such as yours to fulfill new opportunities in BLAH BLAH BLAH.

Thank you for your commitment to your employees, your community and the state of BLAH BLAH BLAH.

BLAH BLAH BLAH is always looking to improve our services. Please take the time to fill out a brief satisfaction survey using this link:

{!surveyLink}

Sincerely,
Some Person at BLAH BLAH BLAH

Some of those items I could have set using the standard setTargetObjectId, setWhatId methods available on Messaging.SingleEmailMessage, but those wouldn’t get me to some of the other data that I needed. So instead, I used the template merely for its body content and manually performed string replacements in my apex class on that body like so:

public EmailTemplate emailTemplate {
        get {
            if(emailTemplate == null) {
                Survey_Settings__c settings = Survey_Settings__c.getInstance();
                if(settings != null) {
                    emailTemplate = [SELECT Id
                                     , Subject
                                     , Body
                                     , HtmlValue 
                                     FROM EmailTemplate 
                                     WHERE ID = :settings.Contract_Email_Template_ID__c];     
                }
            }

            //send in the Contact for salutation purposes
            if(this.selectedContact != null) {
                Contact c = this.oppContacts.get(selectedContact);
                if(c != null) {
                    if(c.Salutation != null) {
                        emailTemplate.Body = emailTemplate.Body.replace('{!Contact.Salutation}', c.Salutation);    
                    } else if(c.FirstName != null) {
                        emailTemplate.Body = emailTemplate.Body.replace('{!Contact.Salutation}', c.FirstName);    
                    }
                    
                    emailTemplate.Body = emailTemplate.Body.replace('{!Contact.LastName}', c.LastName);
                }
            }

            emailTemplate.Body = emailTemplate.Body.replace('{!Opportunity.Account}', this.opp.Account.Name);
            emailTemplate.Body = emailTemplate.Body.replace('{!businessTypePlural}', this.opp.Account.Business_Type_Plural__c);
            
            return emailTemplate;    
        }
        set;
        
    }

Much of the above, (if not all) could have been achieved by just sending in my contact. I could have gotten most of the necessary information from there, however — in so doing, the body of the email would have been rendered but I still don’t have all of my information, particularly my survey link. I wouldn’t have my survey ID yet either as that doesn’t get created until my end user clicks send. By then it would be too late for me to stick the survey link since the email message would be already packaged up. (I did try this, before going this route but ran into some odd issues getting my link in the email message, so I backed out and moved forward with this plan). Add to that the fact that I wanted to show the content of the email WITH the substitutions in place to the end user for review.

Lastly, once the user has selected their attachment and has proofread, perhaps even modified the message (minus the link since it doesn’t exist  yet) they click send. I then save all the necessary objects, including my survey and stuff that into the email message before calling my sendEmail method.

private Messaging.SendEmailResult[] sendEmail() {
        Messaging.SingleEmailMessage msg = new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage();
        List attachments = new List();
        Messaging.EmailFileAttachment contractFile = new Messaging.EmailFileAttachment();
        contractFile.setFileName(emailFile.name);
        contractFile.setBody(emailFile.body);
        attachments.add(contractFile);
        msg.setFileAttachments(attachments);
        msg.setSubject(emailTemplate.Subject);
        msg.setToAddresses(new String[] { this.oppContacts.get(selectedContact).Email});
        msg.setHtmlBody(emailTemplate.Body);
        Messaging.SendEmailResult[] result = Messaging.sendEmail(new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage[] {msg});
        return result;
    }

Which gets called from this hunk of code in my save method on the controller.

Survey_Settings__c settings = Survey_Settings__c.getInstance();
                if(settings != null && settings.Customer_Satisfaction_Survey_URL__c != null) {
                    String surveyUrl = settings.Customer_Satisfaction_Survey_URL__c + '?aid=' + this.survey.ID;
                    emailTemplate.Body = emailTemplate.Body.replace('{!surveyLink}', surveyUrl);    
                }   

                //send the email
                emailTemplate.Body = emailTemplate.Body.replace('\n', '
');
                Messaging.SendEmailResult[] result = sendEmail();

I then manually create an activity that logs this message and includes the body of the email in the description field of the task. The task is set to Completed in code so it goes directly to Activity History.

In the end, the solution provides full access to content to the admin, and full control over the flow complete with some extra automation that they couldn’t get out of their old process.

Hope this helps should ever find yourself in a similar situation…

:wq!