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....