Track time spent in MSCRM - calendar

My requirement is I need to be able to track time for each sales person on activities. Also a report that administrators can run to see the amount of time each user spent working on calls/sales/opportunities etc.
What should I use to track how long is user using particular activities?
I think I can do it using auditing.
Do you have any better ideas?

User Auditing isnt going to be much help here, for starters it only reports every couple of hours and secondly you cant write report against for the audit table.
I would suggest adding a duration field to entities you want to track time against - activities already have a field for this. Then users just have to manually populate this.
Or if you want to automate you could use form JavaScript, for example:
New Field: Number, Duration
On Form Load: Capture a start time
On Form Save: Capture an end time
On Form Save: Work out the difference between the two, then add to the duration field
You would have to do this for every entity you want to track though. Its also not guaranteed to be accurate, for example if a user opens a couple of records at once, or goes to lunch, or just doesnt save the record immediately a much longer Duration could be recorded than actually occurred.

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How to know a Salesforce table field is auto-calculated?

Salesforce provides CaseMilestone table. Each time I call the API to get a same object, I noticed that TimeRemainingInMins field has a different value. So I guessed this field is auto-calculated each time I call the API.
Is there a way to know what fields in a table are auto-calculated ?
Note : I am using python simple-salesforce library.
Case milestone is special because it's used as countdown to service level agreement (SLA) violation, drives some escalation rules. Depending on how admin configured the clock you may notice it stops for weekends, bank holidays or maybe count only Mon-Fri 9-17...
Out of the box other place that may have similar functionality is OpportunityHistory table. Don't remember exactly but it's used by SF for for duration reporting, how long oppty spent in each stage.
That's standard. For custom fields that change every time you read them despite nothing actually changing the record (lastmodifiedate staying same) - your admin could have created formula fields based on "NOW()" or "TODAY()", these would also recalculate every time you read them. You'd need some "describe" calls to get the field types and the formula itself.

Saleforce Admin Sharing Rule

[Note: There is a Teacher Object with the fields such as Teacher Name, DateofJoining, and also a formula field called Experience]
My Task was to create a Public Group consisting of another user
and this user should only see teachers who have experience greater than 2 years
But when i create a sharing rule based on criteria the field name called Experience doesn't show up as it is a formula field.
So i got an idea of creating a new field(maybe a text or number data type) which would have the value of Experience in it. (But i have no idea on how to implement this)
Is there a way to implement this?
Any other solution is also well appreciated!
Hard to say.
Normal trick would be to create a helper field (text, number, whatever) and have piece of functionality that populates it. An "early flow" or "before insert, before update" trigger ideally. Worst case a normal flow, process builder or "after insert, after update" trigger. Something like "if Experience__c != 'your formula here' then Experience__c = 'your formula here'". Consult normal SF help and trailhead if you never used early flows
You'd make an one-off data fix to populate existing records and job done, normal field should be selectable as sharing rule criteria.
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But I smell trouble with your formula. What exactly you have there, something like Experience__c = (TODAY() - DateofJoining__c) / 365? That's bit evil. Formulas with TODAY(), NOW() or anything with $ (roughly speaking who's looking at the data, user's name, profile role... not what's actually on the record itself) are "nondeterministic". Unpredictable.
A "today()" changes just like that, without updating the record. Sure, when you watch the record a fresh value will be calculated but other than that LastModifiedDate doesn't change, there's no magical trigger running at midnight that rechecks sharing. (especially that there's no single midnight, you could have users in multiple timezones). SF just doesn't allow nondeterministic fields in many places, see https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/q/32122/799
So if you do rely on TODAY() in your formula you might have to make a "scheduled flow" or read about schedulable, batchable apex. Create nightly job that would run and recalculate your helper field with right experience. You'd probably even need both solutions, a "before save" flow for new data created today and nightly job to advance the clock on existing old data...

Microsoft Access Check in and out

I'm making a database up Microsoft Access to help simplify my job, but I'm relatively inexperienced with it, so I need some help. I'm running Access 2016.
I have a database set up for when students enter the IT Office seeking help, which essentially just records when they enter and what they're here for. So I've put a form on, which lets you enter your information, like your student number, what your problem is, and what your laptop number is. The date and time of your entry are automatically generated by the system clock. The student then presses "Check In", which creates a record based on the information they've just entered to keep track of problems. So here's my question, how would I conveniently give them an option to check back out? I need some way to update the record they've just made, without giving them access to all of the other transactions. I managed to make a list box which makes a list of all the student numbers of people who've entered today, but I'm unsure how to set the check out time of the student when they leave.
Hopefully I've explained that well enough. If you need me to clarify, please pop in a comment.
Thanks everyone.
For users to re-find their record, and not be able to look thru other records - you essentially just need an ID field that they type in; and use that as the query basis for the look up. Possibly the name they entered could be used if you aren't passing out trouble ticket IDs.
The check out info really doesn't have to be a separate table. It can all be part of the same record as the original check in. You can have a separate check out time stamp field that gets populated by a check out button.
The check in and check out may look like separate sides to user - with separate forms that is fine - but behind the scenes I see no reason to have separate tables. keep it simple.
www.CahabaData.com

Calculate resources in a webbrowser game in real time

I decided to write a web browser game. But my mind comes sick when I try to think how to code the resources shown of each player when this display the website.
For example:
User 1 have 500 gold now, and produces +100 gold each hour, how can I show the real resources when the user open the website?
What is the best way?
I think that update all the database of each user adding resources every second is suicidal.
The think is that I have no idea how to code.
Any ideas?
Thanks
When a user interacts with your website, look at the date of the last time you updated its gold amount. If it's more than 1 hour, increment the amount of gold of the number of hours passed since it's last interaction, and update the stored date.
You may do some optimisation on this principle to avoid testing it at each user request during a session (use a cache, of store the date in the session).
Update: store the next update time instead of the last, to avoid multiple calculations (that is to say store the timestamp of the current update + 1 hour). And then compare current time to the stored time.

Time-dependent information: showing one rate and applying another

I have a situation where some information is valid only for a limited period of time.
One example is conversion rates stored in DB with validFrom and ValidTo timestamps.
Imagine the situation when user starts the process and I render a pre-receipt for him with one conversion rate, but when he finally hits the button other rate is already valid.
Some solutions I see for now:
Show user a message about new rate, render updated pre-receipt and ask him to submit form again.
To have overlaying periods of rates. So the transactions started with one rate could finish, but the new ones will start with the new rate.
While the 1st solution seems most logical, I've never seen such messages on websites. I wonder are there other solutions and what is the best practice.
So this is a question best posed to the product owner of your application. If I were wearing my product owner hat, I would want that the data being displayed never be out of sync, such that option (2) above never occurs. This is to make sure the display is fair in all respects.
Ways to handle this:
As you say: display an alert that something changed and allow a refresh.
handle updates to the data tables using DHTML/ AJAX updates so that the data is usually fresh.
To summarize: it's a business decision, but generally speaking it's a bad choice to show unfair and/or out of data data on a page.

Resources