I'm developing an open-source web application (a helpdesk) where the users will download it and install. This application will have some settings like: title, colors, default e-mail, logs... (for example). This settings will be edited by the user on the admin panel because most of them will not understand how to do it in code.
My question is what is the best way to store this on a (MySQL) database model? And counting that this application will upgrade and add more "settings" to that settings table.
Thank you in advance
There are a lot of different ways to do this, and it depends on what you think the final needs will be.
There's nothing wrong with saving parameters in a dedicated table, each parameter/user/value on a separate row. This is a fast way to set and get the information, and allows you to easily get access to reports by parameter and value and user, for example, what colors are the most popular.
If you are just using this for configuration, you can store the parameters as an XML or JSON string in a text/blob field. This has the benefit of giving you a single load to get all of the parameter values. Even more powerful, if your application already has default values for the parameters, you can easily extend the application without changing the database records. For a large number of parameters, this reduces the number of DB calls to load up all the parameters.
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I am trying to represent environment variables in the Salesforce codebase and came across Custom Metadata Types. So based on which Sandbox I am in, I want to vary the baseURL of an external service that I am hitting from my apex class. I want to avoid hard coding anything in the class, and hence trying to find out an environment variable like solution.
How would you represent the URL as a custom metadata type? Also, how can I access it in the class? What happens when a qa sandbox is refreshed from prod? Do they custom metadata type records get overridden?
How are you calling that external service? If it's truly a base url you might be better of using "named credential" for it. It'll abstract the base url away for you, include authentication or certificate if you have to present any...
Failing that - custom metadata might be a poor choice. They're kind of dictionary objects, you can add more (but not from apex) but if you deploy stuff using Git/Ant/SFDX CLI rather than changesets it'd become bit pain, you'd need different custom metadata value for sandbox vs prod. Kinda defeats the purpose.
You might be better off using custom setting instead (hierarchy is enabled by default, list you'd have to flip a checkbox in setup. List is useful if you need key-value kind of pairs, similar to custom metadata): https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/74049/what-is-the-difference-between-custom-settings-and-custom-metadata-types
And you can modify them with Apex too. Which means that in ideal world you could have a "postcopy" class running as soon as sandbox is refreshed that overwrites the custom setting with the non-prod value. For named credential I don't think you can pull it off, you'd need a mini deployment that changes it or manual step (have you seen https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/q/955/799 ?)
I'm working on the front end of an app that uses Solr for data storage. Currently I have an empty index, but it'd (understandably) be a lot easier for me if some dummy data was returned so I could make sure that it's output correctly on the front end.
If I was working with and RDBMS (let's say postgres) I'd open up a GUI (e.g. pgadmin) and type data manually into a few rows to achieve this goal. I have access to the Solr web interface, but I can't see any obvious call to action saying INSERT YOUR DATA HERE. The closest thing I can find to an answer on the web is this SO thread, but it's still not quite the droids easy GUI-based solution I'm looking for.
So, my question is: Is the a way to quickly and easily insert some data equivalent to the RDBMS method mentioned above?
Make sure you have defined a schema in schema.xml.
SOLR does indeed have a (limited) html GUI, which on a local installation is probably found at localhost:8983/solr (default). If you can get to the base admin page, then on the left there is a small combobox where you can select a core/collection. If you click on THAT, then you get a list of options that emerges, and you can pick 'documents' to get a similar GUI to what I think you expect from postgres/RDBMS/whatnot.
http://localhost:8983/solr/#/collection1/documents is the URL on a default SOLR installation that I have. This should work as long as you don't have default cores. (Replace collection1 with your collection name and localhost:8983 with wherever your solr is hosted/the port).
Is there a way to create custom objects and fields by using script or IDE ?
Salesforce is very easy to use, however, it's so time-consuming to create so many fields on Web interface. So, just wonder if there's ways to use script or IDE to create objects and fields in Salesforce?
You're looking for the Metadata API, or already developed tools which use the metadata api.
http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/api_meta/Content/meta_intro.htm
http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/api_meta/index.htm
Though using it directly will still require some developement, which may not save you much time. you get metadata in XML, but would still need to process it to what you want to achieve.
Somewhat also depend on the nature of what you want to do. I for instance had a requirement today for 150 custom labels based on an input file. Was much faster to generate metadata XML than to ever do that in the web interface. Deployed the metadata using the force.com IDE.
Does anyone have an elegant suggestion for how to get the contents of an Excel spreadsheet into SQL Server via a web form? I need to allow our clients to upload modest amounts of structured data, and I need that data to ultimately reside in a sql table. I really can't expect the clientele to produce anything but an Excel file, but I could require that it be an xlsx.
The web app is written in Coldfusion; it doesn't need to be able to handle huge numbers of simultaneous requests, but I don't want to consider some sort of server-side batch job processing or shunt the user to an asp.net page (which is what we are doing now).
Any recommendations (or examples of how others are successfully doing this) would be appreciated. Due to the sensitivity of the data, we really can't do anything to compromise the security of the web or sql servers.
If you are using CF9, then you could easily use the cfspreadsheet tag too. I mention this one specifically because Shawn's link did not (presumably due to its being relatively new on the CF scene). Here's the livedoc link: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/CFMLRef/WSc3ff6d0ea77859461172e0811cbec17cba-7f87.html
For full use, I would create a web form with a standard file upload field. On the backend handling the form submission, get a copy of the file with
<cffile action="upload" destination="uploaded.xls".....>
Then use:
<cfspreadsheet action="read" query="myExcelData" src="uploaded.xls" ...>
At which point, your spreadsheet content will be available as a query object. You can then loop over this query, running insert queries into your sql server each time you loop. That should do it.
Here are the most notable options to help point you in the right direction; choose what you are most comfortable with (Source: Charlie Arehart).
CFXL
JXLS
CFX_Excel
My personal recommendation is to go the CFX_Excel route. Although a commercial product, it will grant you the most functionality/flexibility of the options listed.
for a data warehouse project I need to know about some best practices regarding custom report viewer filters/parameters.
Usually I use the standard parameter feature for reports, like multiple select boxes, check boxes, text boxes etc.. But for the current project some reports require more complex report parameters. E.g. a user wants to analyze some measures. For that the user needs to set a filter on a specific address. There are over 100.000 address to choose from, so he has to have the ability to search for an address (full text). Since such features cannot be done with the standard parameters, I will have to create custom params within a ASPX page which are then passed to the report viewer control.
So my question is: Are there any best practices on how to create custom parameters? Did anyone had similar problems, if so, how did you solve it?
Create your parameters on a simple web form that queries valid values from the database. Then Pass the parameters to the report server via the URL. Here is the documentation for Passing parameters via URL string
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms152835.aspx