Dallas MeetUp -May 27

Last night  Dallas meetup was so much fun .I had the chance to present on Angular + Bootstrap + Visualforce with sample code .

I am so glad it went really well and also provided me opportunity to connect with lot of local folks who are excited to be a part of Salesforce Community .

Quickly wanted to share the code sample that I presented at meetup .

A simple responsive page to add Account Card was built using bootstrap and JS remoting along with angular concept of using modules .

The Presentation is at slideshare so that if you missed my session you can go through the same .It covered basics of bootstrap and angular JS and then explained the code snippet of how to use angularJs in salesforce .

Dallas meetup session  on Bootstrap + Angular + Visualforce from Mohitkumar Srivastav

The code samples I have shared on Github

Apex Controller


Visualforce Page

Hopefully this session was helpful .Please let me know how you feel about the whole session .Thanks

Lightning Components Framework Learning Resources

Building custom lightning components will be a required skills for salesforce developers in coming years .Whenever there will be need for building SPA (Single Page Applications) for Salesforce 1 ,using lightning components will be one of the architecture choice .

Although  there are multiple frameworks that one could use which includes angular,backbone,ember etc but lightning is from salesforce and uses aura framework hence it will be really good candidate to consider for building SPA applications .

The aim of the blogpost is to share some useful resources  on how I have gained some expertise around building lightning components .

If you are familiar with javascript framework or at least have hands on experience with one of them ,your learning curve for lightning components will be pretty small.If you don't have none or never worked on Javascript ,you may like to go through some of javascript course and get yourself up to speed.

The key point to understand will be while building lightning components  the javascript code will follow event driven pattern .Each component can emit events and other components listen to  different events and perform server side logic .You will find minimal server side calls will be made and rest of Dom manipulation will happen with client side javascript controller and javascript helper .

Lets take a look at  various resources that helped me to learn lightning components 

1.TrailHead

This is by far the best methods to learn about how to build lightning components .The Trailhead has a module Lightning components that will force you to do hands on exercises and passing them you will feel confident enough that you have understood basics of lightning component  framework.

Trialhead  on learning lightning component is located at below URL

https://developer.salesforce.com/trailhead/module/lightning_components

2.QuickContacts App Tutorial from Christophe Coenraets

This tutorial is amazing and thanks to Christophe for all awesome work .This tutorial will walk through building a quick contact app step by step .

The tutorial can be found in the below URL 

http://ccoenraets.github.io/salesforce-lightning-tutorial/

3.ReidCalberg Newbie Lightning Component Notes

This notes is quite comprehensive and thanks to author for excellent write up .Below is the URL where you can grab the notes and start working 

http://reidcarlberg.github.io/lightning-newbie/

4.Video Tutorial from Salesforce MVP .

This video is good resource and worth watching all the modules

https://www.salesforce.com/services-training/learnlightning.jsp

5.Paul Battison Videos 

Paul is a salesforce MVP and I love video tutorials from him .He makes difficult concepts looks lot easy .He explains code in very simple english .I subscribed to his youtube channel ,He has put 5 videos so far on lightning and i am looking forward to more of them .

Below is the link to Paul's channel

https://www.youtube.com/user/prb501

Below are lightning specific video links 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amQ-Lt2a6dg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDIROq7nbaQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWt99AWZrDI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaUx04BwUo0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqT-NVR8MXc

6.Jeff's Tutorial

We all love Jeff blog and below is link for  tutorial from him

http://blog.jeffdouglas.com/2015/03/13/tutorial-building-lightning-components-with-spring-15/

Other Helpful Resources

Apart from all this ,salesforce lately added a new tag <ltng:require /> and below blogs will help us understand more on how to incorporate external JS  libraries in our lightning component using the provided tags

https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/developer-relations/2015/05/loading-external-js-css-libraries-lightning-components.html

http://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/54106/how-to-use-jquery-or-any-js-lib-in-initial-post-rendering-of-lightning-compone

http://bobbuzzard.blogspot.com/2015/04/lightning-components-and-javascript.html

http://peterknolle.com/input-rating-lightning-component/

Apart from all this for deep knowledge work with lightning developer guide

https://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/lightning/lightning.pdf

I hope you have enough resources to start building lightning components yourself.

Integrating Google drive with Salesforce Using File Connect Feature

Summer 15 release is out and lot of features to dive into .One thing that caught my immediate attention was ability to integrate Google Drive with Salesforce through lightning connect .

It hardly took me 20 minutes to get this working on my developer edition and I am super excited to highlight step by step procedure to configure this .Please note salesforce did an amazing job on the documentation for this .Its crystal clear to me .

Just to add little more flavour with screenshot would help many folks I believe who have no time to read through documentation .(I strongly suggest please read through release notes )

Step 1

Enable File Connect in your instance .Please note since this is summer 15 release feature i did this in pre-release org 

Step 2

Allow your users to access google drive .Follow the step by step instruction documented in below link

https://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=admin_files_connect_perm.htm

Below shows the permission set that I have created .Remember to check file connect cloud permission 

Step 3

Create an authentication provider for Google Drive

The first step is to create a project in developer console of google 

i)Navigate to the developer console of google using below link 

https://console.developers.google.com/project

ii)Enable Drive API and Drive SDK 

Follow below article path on more info .I am attaching screenshots to help you guide 

https://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=admin_files_connect_google_auth.htm

iii)Create web application so that you can obtain client secret and consumer key to fed back in salesforce

Step 4

Create a google auth provider in SFDC using auth provider configuration listed in document.Please note to specify type as the OPEN ID in the auth provider settings .

In the auth provider  settings you will need to provide client secret and consumer key to the SFDC from google and feed back the redirect or callback URL generated from SFDC back to google application  

Step 5

Create External data sources .Note the type as "File Connect:google drive" .This external data source needs to be added to permission and if your authentication is "per user" type your end users needs some training on how to add this from My Settings tab .Choose Oauth 2.0 protocol .

Validate and sync all objects .You will see an external object created in SFDC and also you will notice if you navigate to chatter files you will see all the data .

There are bunch of other features added as well in this release 

1)Files tab now can provide search layouts for searching these files and no need for searching from chatter

2)Focus Search on a Single External Data Source

3)Files Connect could previously access only standard fields from external data sources. But in Summer ‘15, you can add any custom fields and display them in unique search layouts.

4)Lookup Relationships Supported for Files Connect External Objects

Read through release notes and explore more .Lot of solid stuff in this release and make me wonder "Do salesforce engineers ever sleep". They sleep or not but for consultant like me ,they keep me awake by adding lot of features to the Product .

Hope this feature will make your customer happy that you can access all information from google drive now .