Reporting and Dashboards Blog - November 2008

• Scheduling and Emailing reports in salesforce.com

  Thomas Tobin Nov 30, 2008

  So, another feature that had been widely requested was the ability to grab the results of a printable view of the report, and send it to a set of users:

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  Getting scheduling to work:

  I'm going to assume that either

  1. your user has a "System Administrator" profile, so you have this turned on in your profile
  2. your local administrator has turned this on for you, so you'll be able to schedule for yourself
  3. If you are using custom administrator profiles, you may or may not have this turned on depending on your other permissions

  so we'll leave the permissions/profile discussion to a local one - I'm going to assume you have the right to schedule.

  Viewing a report today
  When you view a report in Winter'09, you should see an extra control on the "Run Report" button.
  
  This new down-arrow allows you to select between two choices:
  

  You can run the report now - the default if you click the button, and what was the only choice, or you can schedule the report to be run.
  Just like when you schedule a dashboard, you can choose the destination emails.
  Who you can send to depends on who can see the folder where the report is saved. If it's in your personal folder, there won't be a lot of choices.
  If it's in a public folder, then you can choose pretty much anybody.
  Otherwise, if it's in a folder shared to a set of roles, groups, or users, you can choose from them:
  

  The last options are different from the options on the dashboard scheduling page. When scheduling, you might have changed the report before scheduling it. Since you might expect to schedule the one you've been working on, the first option lets you save the report as-is, and the schedule you are setting up.
  Alternatively, you can schedule the report based on the last saved version of the report - and discard the current set of report changes you've done.

  What you get

  
  

  So, what do you get in your email?
  You get the output of the printable view, with a few small additions to make sure things make sense:
  the running user is displayed, the time it ran was displayed, then there is the list of filters present (so you have some context).
  

  And that will arrive every time you asked! Easy!

  If you ever have problems, keep any mails that turn up - not just the content, but also the headers. We've seen instances in support where we sent the mails on time, but they were held up somewhere along the way, so keep the email and know how to get to the "internet headers" as they are sometimes called. This allows support to work to find where there was a problem.

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• Using the Eclipse Plug-in to change reports in salesforce.com Winter'09

  Thomas Tobin Nov 17, 2008

  One of the additions in the Winter'09 version of salesforce.com was the addition of reports, dashboards, and their folders t the metadata API.

  The two kinds of API

  There are two kind of different APIs in salesforce.com

  • The data API
    • This is the API that s-controls use, that Apex uses, and it lets you do many things. For instance, it allows you to create Accounts, change custom object records, get lists of Cases, and create workflow.
  • The metadata API
    • This is the API that can create objects, get lists of folders, create fields on objects, and now, thanks to the miracles of science, list, create, edit, and delete custom reports

  In the Winter'09 release of Salesforce.com, the reports are part of that Metadata API, and you can list them, create them, delete them, and change them.

  But what if you are not a programmer? What if you just want to mass delete?

  The Eclipse IDE.

  Salesforce.com has an plug-in for Eclipse. Eclipse is a standard IDE, developed by the community, and a set of companies. Before, every company made it's own IDE.

  IDE - is an Integrated Development Environment. It's designed to let you do everything you'd want to do to develop. You might say "Hey! I'm an Admin, I don't want to develop". But you do - you want to develop reports!

  Back when every company made it's own IDE, the world was less fun. Oh, the area behind my house was all trees and majestic herds of wildebeest roamed the land, but you had to learn a whole new way of doing things when you changed what you worked on. Unless it was the wildebeests.

  What you'll need:

  You'll need a two ingredients:

  • The Europa EE build of Eclipse
    • you can get this from the Europa Eclipse download site
    • you need the Europa EE version because it includes everything you need, and we don't work with the newer versions yet
    • You need to install Eclipse, just unzip the file somewhere
  • The salesforce.com plug-in
    • from the Eclipse IDE download page (with instructions):

  Getting started in the IDE

  The first thing you need is a project - which is, for a salesforce.com project, a connection to salesforce.com with a login:

  

  Then you'll be able to fill in the login details. You should never need to change the "Environment" choice:

  

  Next, you should see progress - a progress bar as it downloads the configuration behind your salesforce.com login.

  Then, you'll see a new dialog box where you can choose what to download. The easiest way to do this for reports is to choose the option "Selected metadata components" and press the "Choose..." button.

  

  Then, we get to choose the reports:

  

  Here, I've chosen to get anything in the "Activityreports" folder, plus one of the reports from the "Campaign Influence Reports".

  And now we can see what we're going to download:

  

  Now the exciting part! Progress!

  

  And now, we can see all of the project's contents in the folder/package view of Eclipse:

  

  Ok, now what?

  Well, first, let's do a mass delete. First, select some reports:

  

  I've just selected the first, held Shift and clicked the last. I can also ctrl-click on reports to select random reports from the list.

  Then press the delete key on my keyboard, and:

  then the best bit:

  Yes! Yes!

   

  Ok, next time, using search and replace....

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