Comments on: Salesforce.com Autocomplete may hint at future customization angle

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 19:10:13 +0000

Cool. I’ll up it as well.

By: Kingsley

Kingsley — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 18:23:24 +0000

I’ve proposed just such an idea : http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/61105/An_SControl_On_Every_Page and it’s getting good traction. get behind it

“If we could enable admins to mark a (javascript) s-control for inclusion with each page of the app, we could enable the development of seriously cool user interfaces. Imagine the power of the Ajax toolkit available on each page – it would make it possible for developers to create things like :

* Inline field editing
* Mass update objects from view
* Auto complete in picklist fields

These customizations should also be shareable on the AppExchange. It would also be great if each field/ label/ tab was marked with it’s id and had it’s object type as it’s classname so that it becomes easier to introspect the page.”

By: jeremy ross

jeremy ross — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 01:19:52 +0000

“Maybe the next release will let you create S-controls that live in the sidebar and get run on each page load.”

That’s exactly what I was hoping “inline s-controls” would be, and they are — in a way. For many use cases, these s-controls need to load on both the detail and edit screens. Unfortunately, inline s-controls only load for the detail view. Argh. We’ll continue the hacks for the foreseeable future.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 22:27:23 +0000

Cool. I thought it was kind of surprising to see a product built this way. Maybe the next release will let you create S-controls that live in the sidebar and get run on each page load. You can kind of do that in Winter 07 on object detail pages, but the s-controls load in i-frames which seems like it would make them very complex to write. Maybe we’ll see a new kind of home page component that calls an S-control in the current window. That seems like the most rational way to do it. There would be lots of power there I think.

By: jeremy ross

jeremy ross — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 22:13:33 +0000

We’ve made quite good use of this type of hack for a while. At points in the past year or two, salesforce has threatened to “disable” the ability to do this. They know customers are doing this and will continue to do it, so I’d really like to see them provide an approved mechanism for doing so.