Quick Winter '16 Glance

In case you missed The New Salesforce broadcast event, here is what happened (in 5 words or less):

Lightning Experience was introduced!

There are a lot of things the developers should be excited about, but also there is a big learning curve coming up. If you haven't worked with Lightning Components previously, I strongly recommend you to get on it as soon as possible, especially if you're a developer with no or minimal JavaScript knowledge.

Taking the DEV501 [*cough*] Platform Developer II Assignment for a Test Drive

Over a year ago I wrote my first guest blog post - The Salesforce.com Advanced Developer Certification Experience (501). Shortly after the post went live, I was told that my post has hit very high number of visits. A few months later, I was invited to Code Coverage - The podcast for Developers using the Salesforce1 Platform to share my experience once again. Surprisingly, this episode is the most listened to, which tells me one thing - There is a tremendous interest in the community about the Salesforce.com Advanced Developer (DEV501) certification.

If you're planning on getting DEV501 certified Platform Developer II certified and you've researched around, you must have found quite a few blog posts, answers and tips, which are helpful (some more than others), but at the end of the day, most of it is high level content which leaves you with a lot of questions around the actual assignment.

First Time at Dreamforce? Me Too, Let's Connect!

It's that time of the year... That time that gets over 150,000 people excited about the one of a kind event - Dreamforce '15!

For a few years in a row I have been missing out on all of the awesomeness that everyone is talking about, the stories that I keep hearing over and over again from colleagues and friends, the photos, the videos, the blog posts about the amazing time at Dreamforce... And I have to admit, it's all my fault. I have been hoping that the companies that I worked for will eventually add me to the Dreamforce contingent. Unfortunately that did not happen.

Last year I promised that the worst case scenario is that I will be sponsoring myself and will not miss out Dreamforce '15, not matter what! So, here we are, ready to rock!

Roll-up Summary Trigger (for Lookup Fields)

Many times over the course of my career I've bumped into this requirement, where a roll-up summary field is required on an object which does not have a master-detail relationship with another child object, rather a standard lookup field is used. As we know, the standard roll-up summary field only works with master-detail relationships, so in order to enable roll-ups for lookups we need to write some APEX.

Now this is not some break-through innovation or something that people are having trouble with, rather, it's a helper method that I've written to make my life easier by making it dynamic and have it here on my blog, because every single time this requirement comes up, I dig through my old projects to find the similar code that I've written some time ago, or sometimes I even write it from scratch. Let this serve you as a quick reference or a template which you can extend and add your extra bits and pieces like filter criteria etc.

Rendering a Decimal into any Currency

A few days ago I faced an interesting challenge. One of our clients decided to enable multi-currency in the middle of the project and that wasn't discussed at the beginning. A couple of other developers from my team have built around 90% of the solution (unaware that multi-currency will be enabled at a later stage) and I got involved towards the end of the project. Part of the solution involved a multi-step wizard which includes a product search VisualForce page as well as a summary page before the end-user is redirected to a payment gateway - something similar to a shopping cart. The product records listed on those pages display mixed information that consists of a few objects linked through lookup fields. In order to make things easier and more dynamic, we've used a wrapper class that contains all the necessary information that we need to display. Pretty standard stuff when you hit this kind of complexity.

So, is there a way to render a Decimal variable into a specific currency format, keeping the conversion rate?