Attach PDF to Chatter Feed Item in Salesforce

Generating PDFs in Salesforce is pretty straight forward using the standard Visualforce page functionality of renderAs=pdf. Attaching those PDFs to a chatter post and having them render correctly as PDFs can be a little tricky. Below I have created a very simple Visualforce page and controller to demonstrate this functionality. (Also this solution has been tested and works in the three major browsers: Chrome, Firefox and IE)

Salesforce How to Debug / Troubleshoot using the Salesforce Debug Logs

Setting up your user for Debug Log monitoring

1. Name / Setup / Administration Setup / Monitoring / Debug Logs
2. Click ‘New’.
3. Select your User from the lookup. Click 'Save'.
1. Your user is now setup to monitor and record a debug log for every page load of a visualforce page in salesforce. These logs can be viewed or downloaded for review.
2. You get 20 Debug Log requests at a time... this is to prevent stacking up a bunch of unused logs, so whenever you are done using the debug logs, remove your User from the list to monitor debug logs, or click 'Reset' next to your User and it will give you a fresh 20 requests. Otherwise your name will be automatically removed from the list to monitor debug logs once you reach your 20 request limit.

Using the Debug Log

Preventing focus of first input field and Calendar widget on page load in Salesforce

Sometimes in salesforce visualforce pages, the first input field on the page will automatically be set to focus on page load. This can be very annoying and confusing to a user, sometimes scrolling the page to the far right, halfway down the page, or opening up the calendar widget over your other content by default. This post is first showing how to remove focus from either a input field or the calendar widget, and second showing how easily replicate the Salesforce calendar widget(not a permanent solution as class names and javascript libraries could change at any point in time).

First to remove focus from a normal input field, you can put in a extra input with a type of hidden, and give it a Id. Then write a short bit of javascript to call that hidden field and set focus to it on page load.

see code below

Visualforce actionStatus Component using the salesforce animated gif

In this post I will show a example of how to use salesforces animated gif and the visualforce actionStatus component to represent a loading screen to the user. This can be very beneficial if you have a tab panel to switch in between tabs, or if you are rerendering a pageBlockTable etc.. This visual stimulation is much more appealing than a blank white screen or just a static screen that is populating asynchronously, which could confuse or frustrate a user into clicking off the screen.

Here is the markup

Keyword Action Chatter Trigger – Keyword in chatter used to update/change records

This is a practice demo for the new chatter triggers, working from the released Spring '11
example. By typing the keyword  '!close'  on a Opportunity entity feed, it will automatically close the Opportunity. This could be a very usefull feature to quickly close an opp from a mobile phone on the mobile chatter app.

Here is the trigger code