I recently came across this useful and under-documented Apex String API, i.e. String formattedString = String.format(String template, List<String> arguments)

String.format(..) is again based on the Java MessageFormat class; its documentation says: Treat the current string as a pattern that should be used for substitution in the same manner as apex:outputText.

Apex programming WSDL can be downloaded from the “Setup” area of your Salesforce org. Just land on the “App Setup > Develop > API” page. Instructions to download are shown below:

Retrying web service call failures/exceptions is important because not every exception means it’s the “end of the world." There is always some hope for some exceptions, like Session timeouts or Invalid session IDs. One can always renew the session (if credentials are available) and make those failing web service calls work again.

As mentioned in my previous post, I was researching/benchmarking on how HTTP Compression with Apache Axis improves performance. The results I got post HTTP compression, are surprisingly amazing…

I have been speaking a lot about using WSC above Apache Axis, but today I found an interesting old post about HTTP compression with Apache Axis. This is interesting because it can boost performance for those who are integrating with Salesforce web services using Java Apache Axis.

One can get errors like: No such column ‘SmallPhotoUrl’ on entity ‘Name’ OR No such ‘column CompanyName’ on entity ‘Name’. On an SOQL statement like:

Force.com sites redirects to “Authorization Required” page in case something goes wrong behind the scenes, for ex…

The key to write a good apex test case is isolate test-data from actual org/user data. If your test case in anyway depends on org data, then it will fail for sure in deployments across different Salesforce orgs…

Apex static is always confusing for me. I am from a Java background, so it took a while for me to really understand the differences between Apex and Java static. This post discusses apex controller static behavior, i.e., in relation to Visualforce only.

What if you want to create a Batch Apex Job that uses SOQL having aggregate functions like SUM, MAX, and COUNT on top of results grouped by the “GROUP BY” clause? You can’t easily create a Batch job via QueryLocator, as shown below. When working with Batch Apex in Salesforce, you might encounter a scenario where you need to run SOQL queries with aggregate functions like SUM, MAX, or COUNT while grouping results using the GROUP BY clause.

I stumbled upon a strange Batch Apex issue today. My batch job was going well in a few SFDC orgs; after deploying the same to a new org it stopped working completely. I just see, “First error: Attempt to de-reference a null object” in debug and apex logs. 

You must be stuck up with Apex, when sorting is required on instances of user defined classes and pre-loaded Sobjects. Unfortunately standard Apex API just gives a method List.sort(), that just works with primitive data types…

This post is especially for those with a Java application (production) working with SFDC web services via Apache Axis stubs (WSDL2Java). However, due to the known advantages of WSC, you want to add some new functionality, such as the Bulk API.

This post tries to cover a common night mare while developing solutions on top of Salesforce using Partner/Enterprise WSDL web services. So this post can be super helpful for developers working with following technologies with Salesforce Partner/Enterpise WSDLs…

This post is for developers working on Visual Force. I came across an interesting way to control the rendering of HTML markup; previously, I was using “<apex:outputPanel .. />” for controlling the rendering of some HTML markup. This approach works….

I am working and doing R&D with the Salesforce WSC library to get Tolerado ported to it. Most of the pieces worked well, but I was initially stuck with Metadata WSDL issues. I faced the following two major blockers: Metadata WSDL Compilation Issue and Metadata Connector Config Issue.

Sometimes while working with Salesforce Web Service APIs, we get a “No Operation Available for Request” error. This error comes because the “Web service ENDPOINT URL” is not correct. In my case, this error came when I was trying to use “apex.wsdl” for executing Apex test cases via my Java code.

501 error comes when we cross the governor limit, that is, “total number of records retrieved by SOQL queries”. As per this limit, a single Apex testMethod can only retrieve 500 rows in all SOQL calls.

Apex wrapper on Apex DOM classes(Document, XmlNode). It exposes W3C DOM API for XML manipulation, which is pretty popular and known to most developers, so saves…