If you are new to Force.com Email Services and having a hard time writing test methods for your Apex code, this code sample might help you get started.

You can receive email attachments with inbound emails and often you want to build Apex code that uses the attachments. How do I create an inline attachments for the test method?

The example below shows you how you can create a new email message and assign the attachments to it. You can also find the code sample here.

static testMethod void myTestMethod() {

   // Create a new email, envelope object and Attachment
   Messaging.InboundEmail email = new Messaging.InboundEmail();
   Messaging.InboundEnvelope env = new Messaging.InboundEnvelope();
   Messaging.InboundEmail.BinaryAttachment inAtt = new Messaging.InboundEmail.BinaryAttachment();

   email.subject = 'test';
   env.fromAddress = 'user@acme.com';

   // set the body of the attachment
   inAtt.body = blob.valueOf('test');
   inAtt.fileName = 'my attachment name';
   inAtt.mimeTypeSubType = 'plain/txt';

   email.binaryAttachments = new Messaging.inboundEmail.BinaryAttachment[] {inAtt }; 

   // call the class and test it with the data in the testMethod
   myTestObj emailServiceObj = new myTestObj();
   emailServiceObj.handleInboundEmail(email, env );                      
}    

I have built an example of how you can use Salesforce Ideas and create new ideas from emails. Using Force.com Email Services to allow people to send emails and convert the emails into new Ideas.

Taking the subject line as the title of the Idea and use the body of the email as the content for the Idea.

The main class for creating the Email Services is below.

Global class IdeasSample implements Messaging.inboundEmailHandler{

 Global Messaging.InboundEmailResult handleInboundEmail(Messaging.InboundEmail email,  Messaging.InboundEnvelope env ) {
 
 Messaging.InboundEmailResult result = new Messaging.InboundEmailResult();
 
 // Create the new Idea from the incoming email
        createIdea(email.subject, email.plainTextBody, env.fromAddress);
    
 // Set the result to true, no need to send an email back to the user
 // with an error message
 result.success = true;
 // Return the result for the Apex Email Service
 return result;
}

Creating the Idea takes the subject, text body of the email and the from email address as arguments

public static Idea[] createIdea(String IdeaTitle, String ideaBody, String fromEmail) {

  // instance of a new Idea
  Idea[] newIdea = new Idea[0];

  // create a new Idea
  newIdea.add(new Idea(Body = ideaBody,
            		Title = IdeaTitle));

   insert newIdea;
         
   sendEmail(fromEmail,newIdea); 

   return newIdea;    
 }    

To see the full code sample check this out

Most companies send out marketing emails to their customers and prospects, and need a way to allow them to unsubscribe from your email messages. This sample code shows how you can write Force.com Email Services to process unsubscribe requests from the email recipients.

• The code will search in the subject line for the word “unsubscribe”
• If the words is found, I will first find all contacts who matches the from Email Address and set the HasOptedOutOfEmail to true
• Then I search though the Leads and look for the same email address and updates the HasOptedOutOfEmail to true as well
• The code then returns true and exists

See sample code here

Force.com Email Services or email to Apex is now generally available for all customers who have Apex Code enabled. Email Services lets you define email addresses, which can process Apex code. Send emails to Salesforce and process them with Apex code to create and update data from inbound emails.

The sample code shows you how an email can be used to create new tasks for a contact record with a matching email address.

Example: Send an email to Saleforce with a follow-up note, will setup a task with a reminder 1 day for now.

What is new in the Spring’08 release

• Must implement the Messaging interface
• Implemented a namespace “Messaging”
• Additional input parameter “Messaging. InboundEnvelope”
• New and improved security model
• Uses Email Authentication protocols (SPF, SenderId, DomainKeys) to secure the email addresses

Note: For people who were using the previous Developer Preview version.

Your code will not work in the Spring '08 release, until you change it to the new format, for more detailed information on the changes, please see the Spring '08 release notes.

The WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference and Expo is next Tuesday, January 29th in Santa Clara. I'll be participating in a panel discussion called "Building the Mashable Web" with Kevin Hackman of Tibco. Kevin created General Interface, an AJAX platform, before AJAX became a buzz word.

The moderator for the discussion is Ismael Ghalimi, the CEO of Intalio, an almost 10 year old Open Source BPMS (Business Process Managment System). He is a true veteran of Silicon Valley and serves as an Advisory Board Member on several contemporary statups.

This should be a fun and interesting session and I hope to see you there.

Since the announcement of Visualforce (VF) at Dreamforce in September, I have received a lot of questions about various browser technologies and how they fit into the VF strategy.  The questions range from "are we going to abandon support for AJAX and Flex?" to "When should I use AJAX and Flex and when should I use VF components?".

Read the full wiki article here.

Folks,

Here is great a article on building offline salesforce apps. Yes, you heard it right, offline salesforce apps!

Imagine your Salesforce.com web application user meets a client at a coffee shop, flips open their laptop, and notices that there's no internet connection. This doesn't stop them connecting to your Salesforce.com web application and viewing account and contact information though, much to their client's obvious surprise. With the use of Google Gears and Google Web Toolkit you now can make any on-demand application work offline. Read all about it in this article and download the sample code to get started.

Also, this year, we have Google in the breakout sessions and the Dev Lounge at Developers@Dreamforce '07. It is not too late to join us.

Cheers!
The ADN Team

Ever read a piece of documentation and think "Wow, that was great!" or "That wasn't exactly right. I wish they would fix that."? It can be pretty frustrating to use documentation that's inaccurate and have no way to let anyone know. The salesforce.com Documentation team is right there with you.

With this latest release of the Web Services API Developer's Guide, every page now has a feedback form so you can submit changes, corrections, and, of course, compliments(!) directly to the folks who write it. Just scroll down to the bottom of any API doc page, click the link, and submit your feedback. Giving us your contact info is completely optional.

But will your feedback go into the Internet void, never to be seen again? No, absolutely not! All feedback goes directly to the salesforce.com Documentation team. Although we won’t always be able to give a personal response, we're committed to fixing any issues, errors, or bugs as quickly as we can.

Customer satisfaction is the hallmark of salesforce.com's success. We take that seriously, especially in the documentation we provide. If you're not satisfied, we want to make it right. And of course, if you like the docs, we wouldn't mind hearing that too!

*Read The Friendly Manual

Flex and Flash have been used to create dynamic and rich internet applications for several years.  The fact that you can create compelling, user friendly commercial applications using Adobe's Flex and Flash technologies is undisputed. 

But what if you have a great idea for a commercial, multi-user, highly reliable and available business application?  Your application would need to be scalable, reliable, and require world class data center services.  So, what are your options at this point?  First, you could spend a lot of money and a lot of time creating the infrastructure to support your application.  Or, more interestingly, you could leverage the salesforce.com platform, that already has the reliability, scalability, and security built into it.

Combining Adobe's Flex technology deployed to the desktop using the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) with the salesforce.com on-demand platform using the Flex Toolkit for Apex provides a fast track to RIA success.

For the last couple years we've been providing great AJAX based options for developing on the salesforce.com Platform.  While this has provided a significant ability to create interesting and useful mashups, developers inevitably run up against the Same Origin Policy in the browser security implementation that limits the third party web services that can be mashed up.

We recently released a part of Salesforce SOA for general availability that provides a solution for this problem.  Salesforce SOA is actually two technologies, one that allows the consumption of 3rd party web services from the plaform using Apex Code, and one that allows the consumption of 3rd party web services from the client or S-Controls.  It is the client technology, AJAX Proxy, that is currently available.

To understand how to use AJAX Proxy check out the tutorial/code sample.  For a more involved sample of mashing up Google Calendar using AJAX Proxy go here.

If you are working with templates and template folders, you might have run into challenges around displaying folder names for templates in the personal and public folders.

The API does not return folder name for Personal or Public folders in the API. The personal folder is represented by the user id and the public folder is represented by the org id.

To decode the folders into the personal and public folder names you can use this example code from the  ADN Wiki http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Get_Template_Folder_Names

Example when returning folders from the API before:

After decoding the folder names from into personal and public folders, you will be able to find and scroll through your folders.

You will be thrilled about the Flex Toolkit for Apex. You can quickly build rich applications in Flex using the popular Flex Builder Eclipse toolkit to layout widgets and unique graphics, then connect the app to the Salesforce data. Here is the steps to get started:

Step 1: Watch a quick demo
Step 2: Read the tutorial
Step 3: Download the Flex Toolkit for Apex (beta)
Step 4: Create your killer app.

Also, this year, we have Adobe experts in the breakout sessions and the Dev Lounge at Developers@Dreamforce '07. It is not too late to join us.

Cheers!
The ADN Team 

Upsert() is a hidden gem in the API.    Our goal for upsert() was to allow you to push data from an external database into Salesforce.com using without having your external system know anything about salesforce.com IDs.   Conceptually, we wanted to let you switch from sending updates that looked like this:

to updates that looked like this:

There are three key problems to solve to enable this : 

1. We have to avoid having you choose between create() or update(), since you don't know if the record already exists
2. We have to help you match the record from the external database to one within salesforce.com using the external system's IDs
3. We have to help you setup the relationship from this record to other records, since this traditionally requires that you know the saleforce.com record to which you want a relationship.

We addressed the first two of these in our 7.0 API.  We introduced the new verb, upsert(), so that we had a verb that would just do the right thing (insert or update).  We also allowed you to designate certain fields as external ID fields.  These fields allow salesforce.com to hold the ID from the external system so that we can do the matching accurately and efficiently.    The upsert() method takes an addtional parameter over update, specifically the name of the external ID field to use for matching for the call.   

In our 8.0 API, we tackled the third.   Our 8.0 API added the concept of relationships to our API.   The changes to our API's data model gave us a flexible way to express the relationship between objects using an external ID.  The new data model allows parent objects to be embedded in an object.   We use this capability to allow you to specify both the name of the parent object's external ID field and to include the external system's ID value.

If you have custom fields with the external ID property set on both Account (DUNS__c) and on User (EmployeeID__c), this is what it looks like to use upsert() via our AJAX toolkit:

// Create a record to be upserted using DUNS number
var account = new sforce.SObject("Account");
account.Name = "ACME Widgets";
account.DUNS__c = "1234567";
account.Phone = "2837484894";

// Set the relationship to an Owner (User) using Employee ID
// we use a nested User object with an external ID field set
// rather than just setting an ID field on account
var owner = new sforce.SObject("User");
owner.EmployeeID__c = "123456";
account.Owner = owner;

// upsert call using DUNS__C as external ID
var result = sforce.connection.upsert("DUNS__c", [account]);

One caveat:  When you nest a parent object, you can only set one external ID field on it.  In other words, you cannot use upsert to do a cascaded update to the parent.

This may look like a lot of code, but it does a lot!  We were able to do the complete operation with a single call to the API.  Without upsert, this would have required two additional calls to get salesforce.com IDs on Account and User and some client logic to choose between create() and update().  Fewer API calls also means fewer network round trips    The result is less code, less client logic, and much higher performance!

In Winter '07, we've released the first fully supported version of our popular AJAX Toolkit.   The new toolkit is a ground up rewrite of the original toolkit -- the new toolkit provides a streamlined API and as much as a 5x performance boost over the original.

Incorporating the new toolkit into s-controls couldn't be easier -- we're hosting the toolkit directly on our production servers, so all you need to do to include the toolkit is add a simple script element:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/soap/ajax/8.0/connection.js"></script>

In an s-control in the context of a user's web session, we will automatically set the toolkit up with a current Session ID and the proper serverURL -- no need to call login().   Once the toolkit is loaded, you can start making calls against the API directly.  Here's a code snippet that will query a set of accounts and loop over them, printing the Account name:

var result = sforce.connection.query("select Name from account"+ 
                             " where BillingState in ('CA', 'OR', 'WA')")
result.records.forEach(function(account) { print(account.Name) })

One notable difference from the original toolkit is that you can now access fields directly, without using a getter (i.e. no account.get("Name")) -- which makes the code more compact and easy to read.     The setters/getters are still there, of course, if you'd rather use those.

We have a complete set of docs for the new toolkit available.   We've also put together a guide for those who'd like to port their s-controls from the Beta version.  You can find that under Migrating from the Beta AJAX Toolkit.

Over at the AppExchange, we also already have some nice contributions that build on or extend the AJAX Toolkit:

• AJAX Tools - This package contains a collection of tools for developers working with AJAX toolkit to build s-controls.  Included in the package are:  A syntax-highlighting editor that can load/save s-controls directly from your account at salesforce.com;  extensive code samples for the toolkit, dojo, and the UI in a handy code browser; a javascript shell with completion and input history -- very handy for trying commands against the API; and a SOQL Explorer for browsing your data schema and building SOQL queries.   A MUST for every Developer Edition account.
• Scripting Toolkit - This offering lets you use the AJAX Toolkit and javascript as a scripting language from Windows.   With this package, you can write and run batch scripts to do common and/or bulk tasks using the salesforce.com API using nothing more than a simple text editor (no IDE, no compiling, etc).  Very Handy!   

If you have other examples of the AJAX toolkit in action, let's see 'em -- post them to the comments section below.

Even for those lucky enough to spend all day with the Apex platform, some of the gems of the new SOQL syntax in the 8.0 API continue to delight and amaze.  Today's discovery (for me, at least) is the DATE syntax available in working with timestamps.

Date math is one of those painful and tricky things, that often involves delving into the calendar APIs of your favorite language.  Imagine trying to get a list of all the new members of a campaign for the previous day - before, you'd need to construct a date, roll it back to yesterday, make sure you handled any tricky year/month boundaries, and dynamically insert the date in your SOQL as "createddate > 1999-01-01T23:01:01Z and createddate < 1999-01-02T23:01:01Z" (or something close).

Now, that SOQL statement is as simple as "createddate = YESTERDAY".

Wow!

You, can even do something like 'createddate = LAST_N_DAYS:4" to get the preceding 4 days of data.

Full details are here.  Another great reason to start using API 8.0, as if relationships weren't enough!

It's been a pretty hectic month or so, but I've finally published the latest version of the sforce, er, Apex Explorer.  There is more that I want to put into it, but, due to popular demand, I've packaged up a cut that supports SOQL-R and has all the new describe meta-data in the schema browser. 

As always, the source is included so feel free to look under the covers.

Apex Explorer 8.0

Cheers

Managing context during the execution of a callback function froam an asynchronous Javascript call can get a bit hairy at times.  This is because when you execute your Apex AJAX method you can only specify the function that gets called without arguments.  One example would be to pass an element to the callback that will display the data returned from the function.  Perhaps I have two tables that I would like to render asynchronously and the only difference is the destination of the data.  What would be optimal is to be able to pass the table element to my callback function, thereby avoiding duplicate code from having to similar callbacks that only differ by name.

This is possible in the new Ajax Toolkit for Winter07.  The callback argument can be a structure that contains multiple useful values.  The one that will help us in this case is the "source" value.  Our source value is essentially a set of key-value pairs.  When used as part of the callback argument, this source structure is passed, without modification, to the callback function.

Here is a sample.  In the new toolkit, you can specify a callback for failure and for success.  In either case, the "source" value is returned to our callback.  The result contains the results of the API call.

  var result = sforce.connection.query("Select Name,Id from User", {
      onSuccess : renderUser,
      onFailure : handleError,
       source : {tableName : document.getElementById("leftUserTable"), background : "red"}
    });

  function renderUser(result, source) {
    log(source.newValue);
    var records = result.getArray("records"); 

    for (var i=0; i<records.length; i++) {
      var record = records[i];
      log(record.Name + " -- " + record.Id);
    }
  } 

  function handlerError(error, source) {
    log("oops something went wrong " + error);
  }

Hopefully, using the new callback structure and, in particular, the source value will ease the transition into asynchronous Javascript development.

Cheers

The most popular API feature request we have ever gotten has been that we extend SOQL to allow it to return related objects along with the object being queried -- for example, to allow a single query to return a set of accounts and the set of related contacts and opportunities for each account.  I'm happy to say, we're delivering on this request with SOQL Relationships in Winter '07!

In Winter '07, the SOQL syntax has been extended to allow queries to traverse relationships and return related objects in a single API call.  The relationships are the ones that you have defined in the application via a Lookup Relationship or a Master-Detail relationship. 

The simplest case is where you traverse from queries target object to one or more of it's parent objects.  You can use parent (or many-to-one) relationships like this:

  SELECT Id, Name, StageName, Owner.Name, Account.Id, Account.Name
     FROM Opportunity WHERE Account.Industry = 'Banking'

This query uses parent relationships in two ways.  First, it filters Opportunities based on the industry of the parent Account in the WHERE clause.  Second, it returns data from parent objects -- the Name of the Opportunity's Owner, and the Id and Name of the parent Account.   Prior to relationships, this would have taken no fewer than three queries and some client side processing to produce equivalent results.

You can also use SOQL Relationships to return child objects too:

SELECT Id, Name, (SELECT Name, Phone FROM Contacts WHERE MailingState = 'CA') FROM Account

Notice the sub-query on Contacts in the field list?   This query of accounts returns the Id and Name of each account, and all the contacts  with MailingState equal to "CA" for each account.

Relationships vs. Joins

One frequent question is:  How are SOQL Relationships different than SQL JOINS?  SOQL Relationships have a lot in common with SQL Joins, but there are some key differences.

First, Relationships are defined in your data model, not in your queries.   The relationships you can use in queries are the ones you've defined between your objects in salesforce.com.   You don't need to define the relationship in the query itself.    We hope this makes the query syntax simpler and easier to master.   

Second, the results you get back are object hierarchies, not tables.   For example, if you ask for a set of accounts and all the child contacts for each of those accounts, you get back a set of accounts (one object per unique account) with the contacts for each account nested inside the account object.   

Finally, one thing that you can do with SQL JOINs that you cannot do with SOQL Relationships is exception reporting (i.e. find me all the accounts with no open opportunities).  SOQL can get you all the accounts and the contacts for each, but the client application will still be responsible for finding the "exception" accounts.    If you think this is an something SOQL needs, please vote for the idea over at the Idea Exchange.

For a more complete discussion of the syntax, how the results our returned, and some of the finer points of using Relationships, I invite you to check out our API 8.0 documents; the SOQL Relationships documentation is here.

I should also mentioned that we're also adding support for relationships to Apex Explorer 8.0 (fka sforce Explorer) -- look for it's release next week. Also, our new AJAX toolkit will support relationships right out of the box.

As you can probably see, this greatly increases the power of SOQL and our API.   One of our early developers reported being able to rebuild a custom detail page that previously required 7 queries with a single query and a lot less client-side code.  I look forward to hearing back from all of you -- please share your experiences and let us know what you think of this new functionality and syntax!

Aloha,

Pete

As Peter mentioned earlier, the new docs are out, on the ADN doc page.  If you've been using the Beta AJAX toolkit, please check the guide to migrating your AJAX code, found at the end of the AJAX Doc.  The Beta AJAX code will continue to run your existing S-Controls, but the new toolkit will provide a performance improvement, so check it out. The changes and additions to the API are listed here, and the complete 8.0 API doc is here. The entire Winter 07 release notes PDF is also available for your holiday reading.

With our Winter '07 just around the corner, I am beginning a series of posts to highlight some of the great new features in our 8.0 API.

For this release, we have made an effort to incorporate all of the most commonly requested enhancements.  The result is our biggest, most ambitious release of the API ever!   Here are some of the highlights:

• SOQL Relationships – Now you can create SOQL queries that filter on and retrieve data from related records in a single call -- retrieve an account and all its related opportunities and contacts with a single query.   This is an object-oriented answer to SQL Joins for SOQL.
• AJAX Toolkit – Now you can access the API from javascript easily using our high performance AJAX toolkit.  This ground-up rewrite is 3-5x faster than our beta AJAX toolkit and supports synchronous and asynchronous calls.
• Upsert with Relationships – Enhanced upsert call allows you to insert or update records and their relationships using foreign IDs from an external system.  Integrating with a legacy system has never been easier!
• ConnectOut - ConnectOut allows you to use workflow to trigger outbound Web Service calls to and SOAP endpoint you define.  With this, you receive near real-time notifications of changes and additions to your data at Salesforce.com without polling!
• Merge API – The merge functionality previously only available via the UI is now available via the API.  This enables customers to provide their own logic to  efficiently and reliably merge Accounts, Contacts, and Leads.
• SOQL  Enhancements – SOQL now has support for ORDER BY, LIMIT, IN, and count(), familiar to SQL developers.  toLabel() and convertCurrrency() methods allow queries to retrieve translated labels and converted currencies.
• SOSL  Enhancements – As with SOQL, SOSL now has support for ORDER BY, count(), toLabel() and convertCurrrency(). SOSL Queries can now also return data from parent records via relationships (e.g. Account name for a Contact).
• Updated Apex Explorer and Data Loader - Our popular API clients have been updated to take advantage of the new features in the 8.0 API.
• Custom Validation and Unique Fields– New features in the application such as Custom Validation rules on fields and Unique field constraints are also enforced via the API
• New Objects, New Metadata – We now expose more of our standard objects via the API (e.g. Workflow Approvals, EmailTemplate) and expose more metadata.

I will be diving into to each of these features in subsequent posts.  Stay tuned! 

In the mean time, if you want to learn more about what the new release, keep an eye on ADN.  We'll be publishing release notes and 8.0 documentation in the next couple of days. 

Let us know what you think!

I recently wrote an Objective-C / Cocoa library for accessing the Salesforce.com API called zkSforce, which I used to build SoqlXplorer and SfCubed. It's released it under the uber liberal open source MIT license, share & enjoy.

From one of our Sales Engineers, Steve Buikhuizen, comes a great development tool!

One for the Mac folks, I put together a native OSX app for testing out SOQL queries, examining the describe details etc, called soql Xplorer. enjoy!

If you don't like to use Visual Studio for debugging, or need to debug a non IE problem that you are having writing scontrols, you should check out FireBug.

Read about FireBug

AJAX Toolkit for Smarties

First I would like to thank everyone that came to the AJAX session at Dreamforce '05.  The session was well attended and the question and answer period was very constructive.

There was one question in particular that I'd like to repeat.  The question was "Will you be adding UI widgets to emulate the salesforce look and feel to the toolkit?".  My answer was no.  Instead, the philosophy behind the toolkit that salesforce.com will provide now and in the future is to provide a core that simplifies the ability to consume the salesforce.com web service.  That will be the base toolkit.  I would like to begin building libraries of widgets (an overworked term to be sure) and extensions that add value to the toolkit.  I encourage everyone interested to do the same and to publish these using our community forum for the use of other developers as well.  A great widget to start with would be to emulate the little magnifying glass link on our standard edit pages.  This link brings up a search dialog in the context of the field that it is next to.  I have already seen one of these in action and it may be available sooner than later.

I have had a lot of requests for some of the samples that I demonstrated during the session.  At the bottom of this post you will find links to these samples. 

I would like to comment on the "FullTest" sample to properly set expectations.  This page was assembled as I was casting about trying to find a reasonable way to perform comprehensive testing on the toolkit.  This means that the code was built organically without really having a grand scheme in mind, please be kind.  The idea beahind this page was to create a "namespace" in which I could create discrete tests that could be run one at a time or as a group.  To do this I identify each test process by prepending sf_ before each function that contains a discreet test process.  This allows for an introspective-like capability to determine which functions are part of the test and to, once identified, run all or some of the tests.  Also, for quick troubleshooting and behavior reproduction, I added a text area in which you can cobble together a function and eval it to inspect the results as well as the soap request/response messages.  You should use https://www.salesforce.com/services/Soap/u/7.0 for the server url and https://www.salesforce.com/services/lib/ajax/beta3.3/sforceclient.js for the url to the script libraries.

Download FullTestBeta3.html Test Harness

Download sforce12.html

This is a simple page that demonstrates many of the features.

Nice post that mentions the Sforce Ecosystem

http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=17

What are your thoughts about it? 

Here's a killer sample using the new AJAX toolkit that takes opportunity products, and gives you a screen to convert them to assets.

Many thanks to Andrew for this one!

To deploy this sample:

1. Create a custom field on Opportunity *Named* "Assets_Created_Date". (This is the name as it would appear in Salesforce.com. If you label it "Assets Created Date" the Name should default to the correct value). This field, if available, will be set on completion and will prevent assets from being created from the oppty again.
(If you don't want to create this field you'll have to remove the merge field from the code (it's in there twice), otherwise you will not be able to save the S-Control form as it validates merge fields. The code does not require this field to exist.)
2. Download the attached html file
3. Open it in a editor
4. Copy code and paste into the Custom S-Control form
5. Save form. (If you didn't create the field as indicated in 1, this will fail)
6. Create a Custom Link on Opportunity.
     - Choose "Open in salesforce window without sidebar"
     - Make the height 700 pixels if you think you will have < 20 Assets
7. Add the link to your Opportunity Page Layout.

-Optionally-
8. Create a custom field on Product *Named* "Not_Unit_Based". (Same rules as 1, above). This field, if available and checked, will change the default behavior of one row in the form per unit of each line item (Asset quantity = 1) to one line in the form per line item (Asset quantity = Opportunity Line Item quantity).

Download LineItems2Assets.htm

The guys at Zend have done some things to make PHP5 really easy to use with Sforce.  Check it out:

http://www.suraski.net/blog/index.php?/archives/5-PHP-5s-SOAP-extension-and-SalesForce.html

Introducing the AppExchange” AJAX Toolkit Beta 3.3

As Google Maps and a number of other innovative new web apps have shown, when pushed to its limits JavaScript is capable of some pretty amazing things.  The catch has been that it requires a heroic amount of JavaScript rocket science to make work, which can be painful to develop and debug.  Sforce developers who have tried to develop client side s-controls with JavaScript have likely experienced this directly.

The new AJAX Toolkit opens the door to powerful, s-control based extensions to Salesforce that take advantage of AJAX. Not only can you build sophisticated apps that don’t require any server infrastructure possible, it also makes it easy.  The toolkit exposes the complete Sforce API in JavaScript with the same methods and syntax you already know – making developing s-controls a breeze.  Better yet, the toolkit works in all major browsers, including IE, Firefox and Safari, ensuring that your s-controls run cross platform without requiring additional work.

Want to “mash up” Sforce with another Web service like Google Maps?  Need to create a new UI for a layout or custom object?  Want to create a print view or roll up of other data?  With the AJAX Toolkit, the possibilities are virtually endless.  So download the attached zip to review the docs and samples, and make sure you sign up for the AJAX session at Dreamforce to get hands on training with the new toolkit.  As the toolkit is still beta, make sure you let us know about what you’ve built, and bugs you find or suggestions for improvements.

Note: Like all of our open source projects, the AJAX toolkit is supported only through the Sforce message boards.

Two sample Custom S-Controls, a more detailed how-to and java doc describing the objects in the toolkit can be had here Download docs.zip  .

Here's a simple piece of code that works on Firefox and IE using XMLHttp to query the Sforce API. Works as an Scontrol to display data from an account.

Download crossplatformscontrol.txt

This is an oldie but goodie, but and as I ran across this issue today, though I share it again - the perils of P3P and embedding your Web app inside the Salesforce UI. 

http://sforce.com/resources/tn-11.jsp

At risk of spoiling the ending, the answer is

response.addHeader("P3P","CP=\"IDC DSP COR ADM DEVi TAIi PSA PSD
IVAi IVDi CONi HIS OUR IND CNT\"")