Force.com IDE v.14 released today
Last Updated on Tuesday, 28 October 2008 08:16 Written by Steve Tuesday, 28 October 2008 08:16
All I can say is Bravo to Jon Plax and his team over at Salesforce.com. On first look the new IDE released this morning is absolutely excellent.
My main issue with the v.13 IDE had to do with the organization of source files. This has been fixed in v.14 with a new reorganization based on type (class, trigger, static resrouce, etc.) Things are much, much easier to find now. Thank you!
On project setup you are now greeted with a wizard that allows you to select different types of objects. This is brilliant, because there are now 25 different types available! Pulling all of them for every project would have gotten tiresome.
Two massive time-savers come from the addition of reports and dashboards as metadata types. Here’s an example use case: Each of our consulting staff has a dashboard of key performance indicators specific to them. The dashboards are identical in look, but the reports are different. Now, we can set up one set of dashboards with underlying reports and then use the IDE to essentially clone them for each staff member, changing them slightly.
I can’t wait to use it more deeply–as I’ll have the chance to do over the next couple days. It already feels like this is a tool I’ll be much happier to be using every day. Excellent work Salesforce.com!
Cool things I found in the new IDE:
- Right click the open object, or just about any object in the Explorer list (class, trigger, custom object, report, etc). Click Force.com | Show in Salesforce Web. The IDE will actually log you into Salesforce automatically and go directly to that object in the interface. NICE.
- You can select one or more folders or files before clicking deploy. This will limit the set of things that Salesforce compares to the deploy target, which makes deploying much easier.
- Deploy used to limit the log size to 10000 lines, which wasn’t enough. Today, I copied our 92,000 line log after deploying! (Now what we need is a quicker way to load the log into a searchable window in the IDE.)
- I don’t think this is new, but I just found it. Since you rarely need to open the “meta” xml files — and you can switch to them from any file using the little tab at the bottom left of the editor — it is a great idea to hide them all. Click the little down arrow in the Package Explorer header, click Filters, check name filter patterns, type *meta.xml, click OK. Less clutter!
That last one is awesome! I’ll have to try that.
I’m pretty sure the open-in-salesforce button has been around for a while. It’s hard to know!
I think the experience is so much better with this release.