It's that time of year again… well, not year. It's the tri-annual time for – wait, isn't tri-annual every 3 years? Or is it three times a year? The quadmestrial unveiling of features. I've set these to "coming in Winter'09" and will be drilling into each one with more detail later in other blog posts.

Scheduling and Emailing Reports

Well, this one was top of the vote list. It's been there for a while even, so we thought we ought to do it.

In fact, there's no just scheduling. You have to email, because there's nowhere in salesforce.com to store the report results. The behavior is just like scheduling dashboards or analytic snapshots. It's available for Professional, Developer, Enterprise, and Unlimited Editions – different editions get different numbers of slots.

If you wanted a history of data in an object, you'd use Analytic Snapshots, rather than keeping a set of old reports. Then you'd actually be able to view the history in a set of different ways.

The output is the HTML of the report – the kind of HTML you'd see in the printable view, for instance. The output is emailed to you, if you can see the folder which contains the report.

Reports, Dashboards, Folders in the Metadata API

Well, this is a pretty big one. It allows you – from the Metadata API (you can't get to the metadata API in Apex, for instance, because things could get really weird) to create, read, update and delete reports, report folders, dashboards, dashboard components, and dashboard folders, as well as custom report types, via the API.

There isn't really one idea for this, but these ideas are the kinds of operations you'll be able to do:

Images in Dashboard Emails compatible with Lotus Notes

As I'd said before, the "Scheduled and Emailed Dashboard" feature Scheduled and emailed dashboards - the feature didn't support sending to Lotus Notes. Or at least, you could send to it, but a Lotus Notes client user couldn't see the images. We've watched IBM's progress on reading PNG files – see Lotus Notes and the Emailed Dashboard feature in Spring'08, and decided that we'd just build a switch to control the image format.

So, you might say "Hey, idiot, why didn't you just build it so it worked with everything when you built it the first time?".

Well, there are two reasons:

1. We generate .PNG files for the on-screen version, and we wanted to keep the email looking the same as the on-screen version
2. .JPEG files (the only other alternative for a few technical reasons) don't look the same as .PNG files, because .jpeg was designed for photographs (they put the P in jpeg!), and so don't deal with some computer-generated images very well.

So, if you are a Lotus Notes customer, you turn on the switch, and you'll be able to see the images, but there will be a slight fuzziness around the edges of the lines. We can't get rid of it (it's how jpeg compresses the images).