A couple of weeks ago I was lucky to attend and present at the, “Dreamforce 2 You” Event that was put on by the Orlando and Tampa User Groups. This was the second year of the event and it doubled in every way (tripled in some ways too – from 2 sessions to 6)! There will be more postings to come out of this event, but I wanted to start with some helpful information from my presentation about Reporting.
In my presentation I shared two tips that I always rely on. I will focus on the first one today – using custom formula fields for reports/dashboards. Before you were able to add columns to a table on a dashboard (or now, overcoming the limitations), we needed another way of displaying more information while keeping a dashboard easy to read. Instead of just seeing the Opportunity Name with the Amount field, let’s use a custom formula field to concatenate some other valuable information.
For this example, I was presented with a business case that the VP of a division wanted to see what new opportunities entered the funnel this week. This person wanted to see the 2 amount fields, the account, the owner, and the opportunity name (what the project is). 5 fields to display on a table. I knew I could formula field some of them together and now only display 3 fields. Here is the formula I used to combine three fields into one for a more detailed view – Account Name, Opportunity Name and Opportunity Owner.
Account.Name &" - "& Name &" - "& CreatedBy.FirstName &" "& CreatedBy.LastName
Simple right? Now you can have a dashboard that looks like:
Stop causing yourself a headache with reporting and stop thinking that a formula field is only for calculations. Using a formula field for reporting purposes can solve many problems and make your dashboards more detailed while still being easy to understand.
Finally, a brief, “Thank You!” to @CRMJen, @jhoskins and @jackieforce for all their hard work for putting this event on. I would also like to thank Ingo Fochler from The New York Times Company for teaming up with me for this presentation. I will blog more about this event and my second tip shortly.
*Disclaimer – This was just one example of using a formula field for reporting/dashboard purposes. The field does not have to be on the page layout to work, but make sure you set up the field with the proper field-level security so that it is visible to your users.
First off, let me say what I have told many people already, Watch the DEV401 podcasts on iTunes. They are extremely valuable and a great and simple introduction to Visualforce (at least for non-programmers).
I was meeting with a client the other day and a request was made to have a place where support users can go to see cases in the support queue. Simple right? Click on the Cases tab, change the view to “Support Queue”, click Go. The client understood but wasn’t completely happy – too many clicks.
Light bulb goes off in my head and I say to myself, “I think I can do this using Visualforce!” Except it wasn’t in my head, it was aloud and now the project started.
I gathered my courage and began working. I created the page and opened the page editor. I thought about what I was doing and stared at the “Congratulations” for a couple of minutes. Then I got started.
I updated the page to use the “Case” standard controller. Small Victory! Now I needed to show the queue. At this point I was feeling stressed – how do I write code? How can I display “Show me all cases in the Support Queue”? I knew I could create a view. I then thought, could it be that easy?
The next thing I added was the enhancedList tag. From there I added the required attributes and populated the listid with the view id. Apple-S and done. Now that the page was done, I created a Visualforce tab. Now all the user will have to do is click on the “Support Queue” tab to see all the cases. The client thought is was great and I was relieved.
Here is the point – with the little knowledge that I knew about Visualforce and the helpfulness of the page editor and the Component Reference, I created a Visualforce page. 3 lines of code and I had a solution. I am excited to continue developing more – I play around with a test page and see what the page editor gives me as I type and add spaces and save.
My advice – If I can do it, anyone can do it. Try and you will be impressed as to how far you can go. If you don’t believe me, check out my 3 line solution!
<apex:page standardController="Case" showHeader="true" >
<apex:enhancedList id="View_Name" listId="View_ID" type="Case" height="650"/>
</apex:page>
Welcome to cheat sheet #1. I am writing this to review what I have learned about HTML, XHTML, and CSS. Most of this is syntax that I needed to write down to help me remember!
HTML and XHTML:
- Elements:
- Identify parts of HTML using tags
- Tags come in pairs, start with <tag> and end with </tag>
- Elements that insert something look like <tag … />
- Anchor Elements:
- Inline elements, typically used for links… <a href=”link”>text</a>
- You can use the target attribute to tell the browser how to display the link; target= “_blank”
- Attributes:
- Information about an specific element
- Located within a tag and specify a value and look like this: attribute=”value” and can be in any order
- Comments:
- Start with <!- – and end with – – >
- Tag examples:
- <head>, </head>; <body>, </body>; <hn>, </hn>; <p>, </p>;
<meta (name” “)…(content” “)/>; <title>, </title>
CSS:
- Separates style from the structure of a webpage and keeps the style of a website consistent
- They can occur on the page (internal) on in a text file (external) that has to be referenced using the <link rel(relative- resides on your site) or href (not on your site) /> or you can use
the @import “link”; after the <style> but before any style rule - Syntax looks like , selector {property: value;} and you can include more than one property with a value as long as they maintain the structure of property: value;
- Can create a style class and they are written like this: element.class attribute (if associated with an element) or .class attribute if not
- Inheritence. Parent elements find their way to child elements – if you say the in the body tag that the text is blue, it will be blue unless it is changed using inline style changes
