If you are reading this post, I assume that you are convinced or at least willing to try dedicated Scrum Master for your team. You are looking at various options: hire from outside; pick from inside; let team choose by themselves; nominate one by yourself (if you are a manager). Which one is best? How to know if person from inside is going to be the right person? Let’s go through every option.

Here’s a neat trick that I found.  You can use it to import object data directly into a Map, indexed by the Object’s ID.

Here is an example:

Map<ID,Contact> contactMap = new Map<ID,Contact>([select id, name, phone, email from contact]);

This will import the results of the SOQL query directly into the Map!

I hope you find this as useful as I do.

For those of us who have been developing in APEX for a while will understand that the value of an item in APEX is not always what it seems. That’s right; an item has two values in APEX. The first value is the session value that we can store in the database (server side), the second value is the value the end user sees on his screen in the browser (client side). On some occasions these values are the same. On others they are not. The difference in value can lead to some confusion, especially for the new APEX developers.

Let’s start with an example so we understand the problem. This is actually based on a real use case. I changed the item names and queries to make it more universal, but the principle remains the same. The developer in question had a page with two Select lists containing the…

So with APEX 5 on the horizon, I wonder what other neat hidden features will be included in this instalment.

I’ve certainly learnt a lot about APEX security in 4.1.

Did you know that APEX checks the order of the submitted elements?

IT DOES!!! As I’ve recently found out if you have some custom code that moves page items around and then try to submit the page your will get strange “Session State Protection” errors. Having checking the page to see if it was session state protected or read-only etc which they weren’t and not even the page had session state protection. So at application level with the session state enabled you have to ensure your page layout is submitted in the same order it was rendered.

So a little trick I did was to write some custom JavaScript that run on a beforePageSubmit event which would move all my…

It’s funny how a tiny little thing like a notification pop-up or unexpected audio alarm can derail your key rig in the middle of a set. It might just cause an unexpected sound effect in the house or it might crash your software host! It’s important to try to close any unneeded programs and services prior to playing but how to remember to do it, and how can we be sure we get them all? If you’re running on Apple hardware there is a solution – automate it!

Keyboard Maestro is a powerful Macro programming environment for the Mac and OSX. In “Hypercharging your Mac with Keyboard Maestro 6” I outline the attributes the current version of Keyboard Maestro brings to the table to add to an already very powerful system. In this article and other articles at “the Daily Mac View” I outline the capabilities of Keyboard Maestro. For the purposes of this article, I won’t spend but a little time on Keyboard Maestro’s specific power. Rather, this article will discuss the use of embedded Automator and Applescript routines directly in Keyboard Maestro. To those who want to automate their Mac but to the highest level, nothing can replace Keyboard Maestro.

Keyboard Maestro Itself

To provide a brief overview on Keyboard Maestro, this macro program can almost do anything you need done to automate your Mac especially where it comes to highly repetitive…

Many small-scale businesses do not use database management systems to generate reports. Most of them stick to spreadsheet packages. Unfortunately Spreadsheet softwares are not equipped with  advanced query and report generating features. However, some Excel users struggle with Reports that they update, save and print manually. It is a very tedious job, but VBA can make it better. I have created a spreadsheet application you may used to fill a template/report with different “Records“, save each in a separate workbook, and print automatically.