Force.com IDE is already doing a decent job on top of Eclipse. It provides a nice Visualforce editor with syntax highlighting and code indentation based on the standard Eclipse HTML Editor. I recently tried to create a couple of Visualforce code templates/snippets to quickly assist in creating the pages and was successful in that attempt. The rest of the post describes how.

Today I stumbled upon a requirement to parse JSON in Apex. I was happy about the fact that I know there is a cool open source library calledJSONObject, that will do all the heavy lifting of JSON parsing and another more cooler native JSON parser is lined up in coming winter'12 release…

Dear Apex developers, who are using HTTP Restful Classes know that testing the callouts is not allowed in Apex. People came up with their own smart ways to handle this restriction.

In my recent project, I came across a requirement to create a base class in a managed package with child extension packages that would extend to add their value to it.

All Apex developers creating Visualforce pages with drop-downs and checkboxes use the Apex SelectOption class. On most occasions, instances of this class are created out of records in a database that we can query in a desired alphabetical order

This post is for guys who are planning to release their app on App Exchange and are looking forward to clearing the security review in one shot! This post aggregates all the good links and information you should have in hand.

While fixing security issues for a customer, I came across a very interesting and powerful security API from Salesforce, i.e., Force.com ESAPI. As per the Google code description, this API…

This might be a requirement, if you are developing some complex navigation…

I saw this tweet today about the apex-fast-xml-dom library. Unfortunately, it's true that FastXMLDom can’t support CDATA sections as of now. This is because FastXMLDom is a wrapper on top of Spring’10 Apex DOM classes, and DOM classes don’t support CDATA sections.

Since the release of the Javascript remoting feature in the Spring’11 release, I was super excited about it and was looking for spare time to play with it. A few days back I read about jQuery templates; that’s an awesome jQuery plugin (soon going to be part of jQuery Min)..

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.