Hyperlinks that call S-Controls break when you switch to Ajax toolkit 8+

Last Updated on Wednesday, 23 May 2007 11:08 Written by Steve Wednesday, 23 May 2007 11:08

Salesforce.com made some changes in API around session management when it revamped the Ajax toolkit. If you’re creating hyperlink fields that call Salesforce S-Controls, they will fail with an invalid session Id error if you upgrade the S-Controls to the new Ajax toolkit.

To comply with their new way of doing things, you need to add &ic=1 to the end of your hyperlink to get the code to fire. Here’s a thread where Doug Chasman describes the problem.

I recently upgraded some old code to the new Ajax toolkit to take advantage of the speed improvements and relationship queries. A user reported a problem yesterday and it turned out to be that they were using the hyperlink button approach and it was failing.

The real answer to this is to call S-Controls from real buttons, and stop using fake hyperlink buttons.

Simple but handy web meeting tip

Last Updated on Wednesday, 23 May 2007 10:15 Written by Steve Wednesday, 23 May 2007 10:15

I host a lot of web meetings as part of my Salesforce.com consulting. Since my customers are all over the Northwest US and Canada, we don’t do many face-to-face meetings. Here’s a tip for making invitations to web meetings really easy to manage.

Most web meeting systems have URLs that are super long and ugly. They often look something like this:

http://meetingservice.com/meetingid=Ju84kdj32y&role=Attendee&Setting47=Kij3452kd

Because they are long, I’ve found they get broken by email clients into non clickable links more than I would like. I’d like the link to be shorter.

Even if the links are short, they have the meeting Id embedded in them. What happens when I need to change the meeting id at the last minute? The meeting URL is then invalid, and I have to communicate the change. I want flexibility to change the hard details of the meeting up to the last minute, without having to tell anyone.

So I use SnipURL to create a generic URL that I can then point to the long meeting URL. SnipURL is a free service that lets you create a short url for any other URL. The cool thing is that you can change the underlying URL at any time.

So for a user training I’ll set up a web meeting, get the huge ugly URL and go create a SnipURL like http://snipurl.com/sftraining. When the user clicks on this URL, they get redirected to the huge, ugly URL automatically. If something isn’t right and I have to change the meeting Id, all they have to do is click on the SnipURL again to get the new meeting URL.

Really simple technique, but I get tons of benefit from it.

Nice touch

Last Updated on Monday, 21 May 2007 08:21 Written by Steve Monday, 21 May 2007 08:21

In light of all the Google talk flying around today, you’ve got to love the new Appexchange offering released today. That Benioff is quite the messager…no comment indeed!