Another notice of S-control end-of-life

Last Updated on Friday, 6 March 2009 02:51 Written by Steve Friday, 6 March 2009 01:26

Sonny Cloward spotted this in the S-Control editing interface:

S-controls have been superseded by Visualforce pages. Salesforce will, sometime after January 2010, remove the ability to create and distribute new s-controls. Existing s-controls will be unaffected.

At Dreamforce it was made clear that this technology is on the way out. S-Controls are being replaced by VisualForce. I have gushed about VisualForce in the past. I think that it is a design marvel–the balance of simplicity and power continues to blow me away. The more I use it, the more impressed I am.

But with all it’s power and simplicity, VisualForce currently can’t do everything that S-Controls can do.

S-Controls run in your browser and use the API when communicating with Salesforce. How many interactions they can do with Salesforce are limited by the number of API calls your organization can make and by the amount you can ge done before your browser connection times out. You can actually get a lot of data processing done this way.

VisualForce is light-years ahead of S-Controls in how it works. It hands all the Salesforce heavy lifting to Apex, which runs on the server. This is a great idea–why send all that data across the wire to you only to send it back to Salesforce? Theoretically, you could process a whole lot more on the server and get very fast response. But, because the server is a shared resource, there are operational limits to the amount of processing you can do. These limits are hard and fast, and haven’t budged since Apex was announced two years ago.

There are a number of use cases where I can’t get VisualForce to do what S-Conrols can do for me. One such use case is when you are trying to compare two lists of data and look for similarities. Like comparing the Campaign Memberships of two Campaigns, or looking at all Campaign Members on a Campaign and flagging all the Accounts that are represented more than once. I can’t figure out how to use VisualForce and Apex to handle these kinds of operations that may be comparing lists of 1000+ members.

I’m all for killing S-Controls–I haven’t written a new one in over a year, it seems. But I have some that I haven’t re-written as VisualForce, because I can’t replicate the functionality. I hope that before S-Controls are killed, VisualForce can do the kinds of processing that S-Controls can do, and more. I hope Salesforce.com figures out how to take the operational shackles off VisualForce and Apex in a way that good coders can use to do much more intensive processing than is currently possible.

[Update]: Via twitter, Simon Fell reminded me that VisualForce pages can interact directly with the API. I’d rather be able to use Apex to touch 5000 records, but nice to have this option. Thanks Simon!

Advanced Search Widget

Last Updated on Thursday, 5 March 2009 12:29 Written by Steve Thursday, 5 March 2009 12:29

Tanner Shamrock (best blogger name ever) wrote up how to put Salesforce’s Advanced Search on the sidebar last October. He just posted the simple instructions of how to set it up for yourself. It’s a really easy install and if you use Advanced Search, I think you’ll love it.

Daily Email Series in Salesforce

Last Updated on Wednesday, 4 March 2009 07:57 Written by Steve Wednesday, 4 March 2009 04:38

I’m building a system for sending out daily emails to Contacts that uses Time-Based Workflow. We’ve done some work in this area before, but now it’s really starting to come together.

In this example, Contacts are added to a Campaign that is configured with a number of planned email sends. Once the Email Series is kicked off, the Contacts will receive emails on the determined schedule. This example uses hard dates for the individual sends–we’ve also got working code that sends out emails on interval from the individual Contact’s campaign join date. That allows for open-enrollment to an Email Series.

Check out the example, I’m very happy with it. Check out the background noise–we sound like a CRM sweatshop!