Occassionally, salesforce.com isn't reachable to our partner portal, usually during salesforce's scheduled maintenance periods which typically occur around 10-11 pm pacific time.

When this happens, users who attempt to login to the portal get an error like this:

                       ; nested exception is: org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpException: Timeout waiting for connection

This seems acceptable while salesforce.com is in fact unreachable, but we've found that our portal continues to return this error sometimes for several hours.  In effect, the portal is "stuck" in this error state and the way we resolve this is to reload the application via the Tomcat admin console.  This exact scenario played out last night, as we received an e-mail from a user at 1:24 am reporting this error.  I tried logging in at about 8:15 am and reproduced the timeout error, so I was forced to reload the app to "clear" the the error.

Anyone else encountered this or have any idea how to resolve this?

If you run a salesforce.com test instance (test.salesforce.com) and you want to run your partner portal in a parallel dev/test environment, here's configuration-based approach to accomplish this:

1) Add to Config.properties

# Salesforce Endpoint
salesforce.endpoint=https://test.salesforce.com/services/Soap/u/5.0;

2) Edit \WEB-INF\src\java\com\sforce\soap\partner\SforceServiceLocator.java

private final java.lang.String Soap_address = (String) props.get("salesforce.endpoint");

3) In your production environment's Config.properties...

salesforce.endpoint=https://www.salesforce.com/services/Soap/u/5.0;

If a sales rep using salesforce wants to assign a lead to a partner to view through the portal AND send the partner an e-mail notification, the partner will receive the standard notification text....

Lead: xxxxxxxxxxx has been assigned to you.

To view the details of this lead in Salesforce click on the following link:

https://na1.salesforce.com/xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

This is a problem, because partners don't use na1.salesforce.com.

Please consider enabling customizable e-mail templates for this to accomodate partner portal users.

Thanks,

David

Just a suggestion:

Be nice if there was a way to link from a custom sforce web app into an area of a screen via an anchor link (for example, the Contact Roles related list section on the Opportunity screen).  I can easily link into an Opportunity, but the user must scroll to find the related section.

Let's say I want to create a custom object called Quote and related list that will appear in the Opportunity tab.  New Quotes will be created via a weblink to a custom web app; that app in turn writes to the Quote object via the API. 

Is it possible to configure something to remove the New button displayed above the related list?  This would enable us to leverage this related list as reference data (like Stage History), but not directly edit data in the custom object from within salesforce.

Hi

The contact id of the same contact is composed of different characters when getting it from a merged field of a web link and getting it from partner api. The example is:

00330000005RJCf (from merged field of contact id in the web link)

00330000005RJCfAAO (from a partner api query)

I have been using the sForce Provider for .NET for several integrations with great success.  Kudos to the developers who did a fantastic job.

I am having a problem with one particular integration in which I want to pass the session id passed from SFDC and reuse it to create a connection within my asp page.  When I do this using the sForce api, it is as simple as setting the sessionheadervalue of the sForceService equal to the SessionID.  Can anyone tell me how I can do the same thing with the provider?

(The reason I need to do this rather than hard-coding a user and password is that the ASPX page is going to create objects within SFDC that I would like the user to own)

Thanks.