Mid-Dormancy Updates

The good news is that I'm more used to Apex+SOQL than PL/SQL+SQL now. I can't say the same of SQL vs. SOQL (SOQL still drives me bonkers), but I'm not floundering enough to have to write down my daily frustrations any more. In fact, I'd say I'm starting to bang out Apex triggers rather often!

I've also had the chance to work on some other really cool projects. When I went to Dreamforce, I vacationed at the home of a hobby-acquaintance who happens to be part of San Francisco's tech boom crowd. Between hanging out in the Dreamforce dev zone and spending time with him and his friends, I got inspired to get my hands dirtier with not-purely-database Salesforce programming.

• With a friend's help, I developed a Python (Pandas & OAuth & Flask) web application and hosted it on Heroku.com. It facilitates a colleague's daily updates/inserts of external data into Salesforce using Name+Email as a matching key. (Name+Email for matching is not natively supported by Salesforce data loaders.)
  
  My colleague provides my tool a .CSV file of names, email addresses, and data to be uploaded into Salesforce.
  
  The web application downloads a list of names+email addresses+IDs from Salesforce, joins the two lists, and returns the user's .CSV file to them in a form that is ready to "upsert" into Salesforce using standard data-loading tools.
• With another friend's help, I wrote my first significant amount of JavaScript/JQuery. Our Web-To-Salesforce form handler wasn't doing a very good job, so I switched us out to another provider. Our forms now do a great deal of "onSubmit" pre-processing to alter the DOM before it goes off to the form handler.
  
  A lot of cloud form-handler providers don't let you choose your own field names, for example. They make you use names like "form143_field281." To avoid changing things like "first_name" to an obscure name/id like that in our HTML and keep our forms more portable should we have to switch form handlers again, I copy the relevant fields into hidden fields at the last minute using this JavaScript.
  
  There were also certain "to-Salesforce" behaviors that couldn't really be taken care of in the JavaScript or the form handler's connector, so I got to do plenty of Apex trigger programming as well.

Oh, and finally, I finished my software degree with straight A's. Booyah - time to check in about a raise!

It's been a fun period of blog "dormancy" - happy new year to all.