Redkite

Redkite announce the release of Redhot News a new (100% free) application for Salesforce, which is now available on the AppExchange.

Install and Let us know what you think.

Redhot News brings you the latest news stories for your Accounts and Contacts. Stay better informed, email interesting articles to your contacts, share with your colleagues via Chatter or post to your social networks.

• View the latest news stories on your Accounts and Contacts right in their Salesforce pages.
• Send articles to your contacts — e.g. to congratulate them on that promotion or big deal they just closed.
• Share articles with your colleagues via Chatter.
• Post news stories to your favorite social networks, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (Google+ coming soon).
• Articles come from Google News so you can be sure you’re seeing all the top stories.

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Drop by our booth at Dreamforce for a chance to win an iPad

To be included in the draw, you must:

• Have us scan your details at our Dreamforce booth, and
• Install the Redhot News application into your company’s Salesforce (or have somebody at your company install it) any time between now and September 30th, 2011.

We will draw a winner during the first week of October and post the details here on our website.

Good luck!

Redkite employees, clients and partners are not eligible to participate. Sorry.

We’ll be both in the main Expo and the Financial Services Partner Pavilion. Drop by and say hello and you might win an iPad (details to be posted next week).

We’re always on the lookout for good people looking for a challenge. Check out our careers page and get in touch if you like what you see. We’re using Apply with LinkedIn which means it’s only 2 clicks to apply.

Field sets make so much sense, and I was really looking forward to being able to set up some very easy to maintain code. Unfortunately field sets do have one limitation that I recently ran into. You can’t access them from Apex Code.

To be fair, before Field Sets, you really had no options of displaying a dynamic set of fields on a Visualforce page. Field sets give you some great flexibility which wasn’t there before, so Field Sets should certinly be a part of all your future Visualforce dev design. I only wish it was a one stop shop for my field definitions for both my Visualforce pages and their supporting Apex code.

An example a typical scenario where Field Sets come in handy, is the following. Let’s say you’re creating a Visualforce page that displays some results from an Apex query. In order to change the fields that are shown on the page, or even the order of the fields, you had to get your developer to change both the Visualforce page and/or the Apex query that goes along with it.

So with Field Sets, the fields that are shown on the Visualforce page can now be dynamically configured by a Salesforce Administrator. But what about the Apex query code? From Apex, we can’t access the field set, so we can’t directly know what fields the Visualforce page is now expecting. Is there anyway that we can return the correct fields for the objects that will be displayed by the Field Set?

Yes, there is. The Apex side of the equation already has a load of options for storing configuration data. One approach is to store the field list data in a Custom Setting. The fields that you list should correspond to the field used in the Field Set. The only downside of this approach is the double maintainence that needs to occur. Now when you modify the field set, you also have to remember to change the Custom Setting data too.

So until you can access Field Sets from Apex code, this workaround should allow your Aministrators to add and remove fields from those custom Visualforce pages without having to get developers involved.

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