Gupta Abhinav - Force.com Tips and Tricks

Ankit Arora(@forceguru) is an avid Force.com-certified professional who has been working on the platform since 2008. Since then, he has been involved in architecting, building, and implementing Force.com solutions for on-premise and AppExchange applications. He has also won many online challenges rolled out by Salesforce such as TwitterTrivia, Hammer of Thor, and CloudTrivia.

Ankit is a Force.com MVP (Most Valuable Professional ) and leader of Jaipur Salesforce Platform Developer Users Group. He has been contributing to the Salesforce community in various ways and through various channels. He is passionate about Force.com and exhibits this by actively blogging at forceguru.blogspot.in. He is acting as moderator on the Salesforce Discussion Boards and shares his knowledge and experience by providing effective and converging solutions to developer queries. He has submitted many cookbook recipes that can be found in the online Force.com Cookbook .

Ankit resides in Jaipur, also known as the pink city, located in Rajasthan, India, a city that has been able to maintain its rich heritage from the times of Maharajas, yet picking up the pace to emerge as a strong contender for one of the fastest growing cities in India. Ankit lives with his family and likes to play first person combat games such as Counter Strike in his free time. He is an enthusiast sportsman and a national level player in the online Counter Strike competition.

Though only my name appears on the cover of this book, a great many people have contributed to its production. In particular, I would like to thank my brother-in-law Ajay Deewan, for being my greatest teacher, mentor, and for helping me throughout the book. His patience and support helped me overcome many crisis situations and finish this book.

Finally I would like to thank my family and friends for supporting me.

Abhinav Gupta is a solution architect and an expert cloud computing consultant. He is a Force.com contributor and an avid blogger. He actively participates on Force.com discussion boards, blogs about cloud computing, Salesforce.com, and open source technologies at http://www.tgerm.com, and also contributes to various open source projects.

Abhinav has specialized in both native Force.com app development and B2B/B2C integrations with other platforms/APIs. His area of expertise is not only limited to Force.com; he has also done quality work on other cloud platforms such as developing JEE apps on Heroku, Amazon Web Services (EC2, BeanStalk, and so on), and Google App Engine. He is a Force.com MVP with notable achievements that include creating the Code Share project Tolerado, winning third place in the 2010 Salesforce Developer Challenge with his mobile location sharing application, and frequently being mentioned in the Salesforce.com newsletter and blog.

Abhinav lives in India with his wife and three-year-old daughter, and enjoys reading technology books and magazines and playing computer games.

Thanks to my wife for being supportive and compromising her time and weekends to spare me for the book, my little daughter for all the fun and naughtiness she spreads around, my mom and dad for all the affection and care, and last but not least the Packt Publishing team and editors for their patience and cooperation throughout the book writing process.

Naveen Gabrani is a Force.com architect and is founder of the Salesforce consulting company Astrea IT Services. Astrea is a leader in providing Salesforce.com services. Astrea has three products on AppExchange, Smart vCard, Astrea Clone, and Object Hierarchy, which were envisioned by Naveen. Naveen has 20 years of experience in the IT industry in various technical and management positions.

Srikanth Goati is a Salesforce-certified professional and co-founder of Salesforce Hyderabad User Group. Currently, he is working as a Salesforce administrator with Y-Axis Solutions Pvt Ltd, Hyderbad, AP, India.

Srikanth is an MCA Graduate from Hyderabad. He has acquired the Salesforce Certifications DEV401 and ADM201. He is one of the top three bloggers in the Salesforce community. He has conducted Salesforce training sessions for more than 350 users in his company.

Overall, he has more than 2 years of experience in Salesforce.com development and administrating. He has experience in the Sales cloud, Service cloud, Apex, Visualforce, Database.com, Site.com, and Customer portal.

Internally in his company, he has written more than 50 training manuals on different modules of Salesforce.com.

I wish to thank my parents Prakash and Nagamani and all family members, friends, colleagues, for all the joy they bring into my life.

Thanks to my Salesforce community friends.

Thanks to the folks at Packt Publishing, the authors of this book, and the many others who have provided help and inspiration along the way.

Aruna A. Lambat is an enthusiastic Technical Leader working on Salesforce.com technology with a profound understanding of software design and development. She is passionate about building better products and providing excellent services leading to healthier customer satisfaction.

She has been working on the Salesforce.com platform since 2008. She entered into IT in 2004 as a student. She completed her Master's Degree in Computer Applications from the state Maharashtra, India. She has been working in the IT industry since 2007. She started her carrier as a Java developer and later shifted her focus to cloud computing, specifically in Salesforce.com. She is a Sun-certificated Java developer, web component developer, and Salesforce-certified developer. She is a regular contributor to the Salesforce developer community. She helped the author to cite the example in the book,