I'm designing a service that will comprise a cloud-based database (with a UI for us to manage the data), and then a mobile app for end-users that displays the data to people who want it (primarily read-only). The end-users will be anonymous, and will NOT each have a user account. 

In theory force.com suits my needs well:

- It is a solid, cloud-based database

- It has an API and mobile SDKs

- It has a UI, so managing the data is easy, without writing loads of form code

- It scales

However my reading of the docs suggests that force.com is designed for enterprise apps, where every user has a user account, which is very different. So if I used force.com I would be hard-coding login details into the mobile client app and using a session login, combined with a single shared user account with very limited access permissions. i.e. every single API call will be from the same user account, but across tens of thousands of devices.

My experience of Salesforce is that it's great until you hit a limit, and they come out of nowhere. "You've hit the limit of lookup fields" waaaah? "You cannot access long text fields from formulas" waaah! "you cannot add a roll-up summary field to a lookup relationship" aaaargh! So given this, I need to understand what limits may apply with force.com so I understand what I'm getting into from the start:

Will force.com offer the same per-transaction and per-record charges as database.com?

Is force.com designed for my scenario?

Are there any limits on transaction volume?

What are the limits for each transaction? I assume there's a governor limit.

Are there any limits on concurrent transactions per user account? The docs seem to suggest a max 10 which would render force.com useless to me, but will database.com have this limit?

Can clients sign in via the API without going through the stupid activation process or specifying an IP range? (drives me nuts on Salesforce!)

If anyone can shed any light on using force.com in this scenario I'd be very grateful. I'd be particularly interested to hear from anyone who has built such an app.

Thanks

Is it possible to change a user's license using a trigger, where the trigger is the user signing in?

i.e. can I dynamically change a user's license at the point of sign-in (or immediately afterwards)?

We have bought licenses for both the unlimited CP users (unlimited logins per month) and the pay-per-login licenses. I believe the first is now referred to as the Enterprise Administrator CP license.

We have a profile set up for CP users, and we want that profile to be used by users with EITHER of these licenses.

As far as I can tell:

- Profiles HAVE to be assigned to ONE license type (why??)

- I cannot Clone a profile and assign the clone to another license type (why??)

The issues here are two-fold:

1. Manually replicating a profile is very very tedious

2. Maintaining two profiles and keeping them identical is going to be VERY difficult, and creates risks of both usability and security issues

The two solutions I can see are:

1. Manually replicate the profile, setting by setting (I suspect this will take many hours).

2. Replicate the profile via Eclipse - is this possible?

Is there a better way?

The inability to use the same profile for different Customer Portal licenses is not AT ALL well thought through.

Hi,

I want to display some content in my Visualforce app that is coming from an external server on a non-secure (HTTP) URL. I need to make that content accessible via an HTTPS proxy page in my app.

So I want to create a page like this: 

https://emea.salesforce.com/apex/page?param1=123  (not the HTTPS URL)

Which when accessed, delivers as its HTTP content that which is created by this:

http://www.domain.com/otherpage?param1=123   (note the non-HTTPS URL)

So whatever document is produced by the page on domain.com, I want that content to be output by my VF page. i.e. my VF page just passes the domain.com page content right through.

This would be very easy with ASP.NET, just make a GET request to the domain.com page, and render it out to the HTTP Response stream on "page". But how do I do it in VF?

If I create a new contact in the customer portal, it creates it in MY account. If I go to another account visible in the portal, and add a Contact is adds it to THAT account.

How do I show the Add Contact page in such a way that I can add a contact without it being associated with an account?

This is quite possible in the CRM, so can't see why it isn't in the portal.

Another annoying limitation with the portal - these problems seem to arrive with alarming regularity, and the only way to find them is to implemnt the portal because few are documented clearly in advance.

Record type unavailable Cannot find default record type of the appropriate type.

I am seeing this error when trying to Convert a lead. I have checked the profile for the current user, and the default record types are both Contacts and Accounts are accessible. (I have selected Do Not Create Opportunity, though there are no opportunity record types).

The docs were no help at all, no results in Google for the error. Does anyone know what the solution is?

I have added a new custom field to a custom object. When I go to edit a report that lists those custom objects, the newly created field is not visible on any of the report config pages.

The new field is DEFINATELY accessible via the user's profile. I tried creating another formula field, same problem. I tried creating a text field, same problem.

It seems any new fields I create do not appear in the report customisation screens, even though I can see them on the records, and edit there.

What's going on?

It's convention that we set up http://domain.com as well as http://www.domain.com/

However if there is an MX record on the domain, you cannot add a CNAME alias to "domain.com" which means http://domain.com will not work.

It looks to me that Salesforce needs to provide full IP addresses for each Salesforce Sites web site, instead of this kludgy solution with CNAME records.

I am finding when I use a Sites Component to encapsulate part of a page, it's being wrapped in a span tag. This is creating overlapping tags and leaving me with invalid markup.

How do I turn this span tag off?

I have created a page in Sites, it works fine in Chrome, Firefox, but in IE I get a file-download dialog. The page does not render, it appears that the browser is interpreting the HTTP Response as a file, not a page.

I suppose it could be a MIME type issue, but curious why a pretty standard page is doing this.

Any ideas?

I need to render some markup (conditional CSS) from a force.com app. I've tried putting it into the page, and into an outputtext tag, but both muck about with the markup.

This:

<!--[if lt IE 7]><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/lt7.css" media="screen"/><![endif]-->

Gets changed to this:

<!--*****************************************************************************************--> 

i.e. all the content between the comment tags is converted to "*" characters. A really daft decision IMHO - if we're that bothered about hiding comments we'll do it ourselves, I don't need the platform to make these decisions for me.

Deeply unhelpful.

How do I send a string through to the client without ANY processing?

I have a customer portal that uses a web address like for sign-in and similar salesforce.com URLs for inner pages:

https://emea.salesforce.com/secur/login_portal.jsp?orgId=00D000000Av&portalId=060200000 

How do I configure it so it looks like this:

customers.mydomain.com

I saw an Ideas entry where many people asked for this, and it was marked as Existing Feature, but I can't find any mention in the help, or the forums on how to implement this.

I have recruited a developer to implement Apex-based functionality on a Salesforce.com instance, and my experience so far is that although the creation of objects/fields/validation/reports/search is VERY fast compared to the likes of ASP.NET, when it comes to creating Visualforce pages and add-on functionality not supported by the primary platform it is very slow. 

As an example, recently my dev quoted several times the amount of time required to implement a specific feature than I know would be required to implement it in an ASP.NET app. He put this down to the cloud-based environment (yes, he's using Eclipse) and the fact that it's necessary to continually upload the code with all the tests on a regular basis.

It's a small app so we're not using the sandbox, instead deploying direct to production, the reasoning for that is the risks of this are quite tolerable, and overall it saves time.

I'm interested to hear if others generally find Apex development to be slower than other platforms.

Simple things proving very hard to figure out with Sites & VisualForce.

I have a CSS file I want a Site page to use, how/where do I reference it?

The CSS is uploaded as a static resource (though oddly won't let me call it stylesheet.css as "." is a disallowed character)

Not working, problem seems to be getting the <link> tag inside the <head> tag.

OK, so with Sites I can create a public-facing web site, I can manage the content using the CRM, I can have my customers sign in to do this and that, but how do I use the same web site template across my public-facing pages, with navigation highlighted depending on context, without duplicating the script and mark-up?

I suspect most if not all the benefits of using Sites would be wiped out unless it's possible to avoid this kind of duplication, but I've not seen any mention anywhere of page templating or server-side includes.

Is it possible to creates a public-facing web site with Force.com Sites where some pages require authentication, and authentication can be done using information in Salesforce (Contacts, perhaps?). I've previously looked at the Customer Portal but the licensing was designed by a blind man in a black hole (entirely inappropriate for small businesses, at £3 per LOGIN!), so very much hoping that there's a way to allow a visitor to be authenticated in a Sites application, so private data can be viewed/edited.

The requirement is that a customer can sign in, and view all the objects I want them to view/edit, including their own contact, the related account, cases, custom objects, and some information from objects in AppExchange apps.

Can anyone confirm either way, or point me to resources that cover this? Should I be using the Customer Portal, the Partner Portal, or can Sites do all this itself?

Thanks

O.

• As I've created the app in a trial/Pro account, have I dug myself into a hole by not using a Dev account?
• Can I replicate all my customisations from one SF account to another?
• Is my only way forward to set up a Dev account and manually re-create the customisations?
• Would the best approach be to turn my trial account into a Dev account, and then start using the app from a new Pro account?

Ollie

We have bought licenses for both the unlimited CP users (unlimited logins per month) and the pay-per-login licenses. I believe the first is now referred to as the Enterprise Administrator CP license.

We have a profile set up for CP users, and we want that profile to be used by users with EITHER of these licenses.

As far as I can tell:

- Profiles HAVE to be assigned to ONE license type (why??)

- I cannot Clone a profile and assign the clone to another license type (why??)

The issues here are two-fold:

1. Manually replicating a profile is very very tedious

2. Maintaining two profiles and keeping them identical is going to be VERY difficult, and creates risks of both usability and security issues

The two solutions I can see are:

1. Manually replicate the profile, setting by setting (I suspect this will take many hours).

2. Replicate the profile via Eclipse - is this possible?

Is there a better way?

The inability to use the same profile for different Customer Portal licenses is not AT ALL well thought through.

Record type unavailable Cannot find default record type of the appropriate type.

I am seeing this error when trying to Convert a lead. I have checked the profile for the current user, and the default record types are both Contacts and Accounts are accessible. (I have selected Do Not Create Opportunity, though there are no opportunity record types).

The docs were no help at all, no results in Google for the error. Does anyone know what the solution is?

I have added a new custom field to a custom object. When I go to edit a report that lists those custom objects, the newly created field is not visible on any of the report config pages.

The new field is DEFINATELY accessible via the user's profile. I tried creating another formula field, same problem. I tried creating a text field, same problem.

It seems any new fields I create do not appear in the report customisation screens, even though I can see them on the records, and edit there.

What's going on?

It's convention that we set up http://domain.com as well as http://www.domain.com/

However if there is an MX record on the domain, you cannot add a CNAME alias to "domain.com" which means http://domain.com will not work.

It looks to me that Salesforce needs to provide full IP addresses for each Salesforce Sites web site, instead of this kludgy solution with CNAME records.

I am finding when I use a Sites Component to encapsulate part of a page, it's being wrapped in a span tag. This is creating overlapping tags and leaving me with invalid markup.

How do I turn this span tag off?

I have created a page in Sites, it works fine in Chrome, Firefox, but in IE I get a file-download dialog. The page does not render, it appears that the browser is interpreting the HTTP Response as a file, not a page.

I suppose it could be a MIME type issue, but curious why a pretty standard page is doing this.

Any ideas?

I have a customer portal that uses a web address like for sign-in and similar salesforce.com URLs for inner pages:

https://emea.salesforce.com/secur/login_portal.jsp?orgId=00D000000Av&portalId=060200000 

How do I configure it so it looks like this:

customers.mydomain.com

I saw an Ideas entry where many people asked for this, and it was marked as Existing Feature, but I can't find any mention in the help, or the forums on how to implement this.

We have some customers who are interested in centralizing some data on Force.com and running their public web sites on Sites. But it's essential that we preserve their hard-won SEO rankings. I have heard rumblings that Sites is too new to be very SEO friendly. For example, no capacity for "friendly" URLs:

http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/10093787/URL_Rewrites_for_Salesforce_Sites

I believe, since we'd be modifying their link structures, we'd also need to set up some 301 redirect maps, normally accomplished with things like an Apache .htaccess file. I see nothing that says Sites will allow us to configure 301 redirects -- will it?

Some folks in sales with whom I've spoken admitted that Sites was "too new" for them even to know where to begin in answering my questions on this. But, as a partner, it's ESSENTIAL that I steer my customers on a good path.

Can anyone shed any light at all on these issues?

-- SGL

I have recruited a developer to implement Apex-based functionality on a Salesforce.com instance, and my experience so far is that although the creation of objects/fields/validation/reports/search is VERY fast compared to the likes of ASP.NET, when it comes to creating Visualforce pages and add-on functionality not supported by the primary platform it is very slow. 

As an example, recently my dev quoted several times the amount of time required to implement a specific feature than I know would be required to implement it in an ASP.NET app. He put this down to the cloud-based environment (yes, he's using Eclipse) and the fact that it's necessary to continually upload the code with all the tests on a regular basis.

It's a small app so we're not using the sandbox, instead deploying direct to production, the reasoning for that is the risks of this are quite tolerable, and overall it saves time.

I'm interested to hear if others generally find Apex development to be slower than other platforms.

Hello,

I am using the "Salesforce International Mapping using Google Maps" from the following link.

http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016d25EAA

I have configured and installed this package correctly and using it is fine in Firefox.

 However, in Internet Explorer 6 the user receives a warning:

"This page contains both secure and nonsecure items.  Do you want to display the nonsecure items?"

This is very annoying from a user point of view, does anyone have a way round this?

I cannot solve this by changing Ie settings is there any other way?  I cannot either use Firefox for the general users.

Any help appreciated,

Justin

There has been some concerns regarding the slow load times of  Sites pages. I was wondering what the specific plans are to address this? Caching? Pre-compiling?

Thanks

Jeff Douglas
Informa Plc
http://blog.jeffdouglas.com

Vote for my Idea: Ehanced Apex Testing Functionality (JUnit)