Insomnia

It's back, my dear old friend, Insomnia. Although it's different for me. I don't lie prone in bed, gazing wide-eyed at the cieling. Instead, I sit hunch-back over my keyboard, banging out code and crawling through the web.

Lately, I've been taking a deep dive into Apex and Visualforce, and it's really cool stuff. So cool, in fact, that I'll suddenly be concious of the birds chirping outside my window, and realize that I've been up all night coding again. My last meal was a soggy tuna sandwich about 16 hours earlier.

I do a lot of freelance work, but the current project is for my employer. My boss wants a feature added to Salesforce.com that allows his technical team to send a periodic email status update to various internal audiences when a high priority Case is opened. The tricky part is that there are different rules as to who the email should be sent to, depending on the severity (priority) of the Case and the Customer (Account) who opened the case, and the mail distribution rules change pretty frequently. The users can't easily keep track of these rule changes -- so we're going to let Salesforce.com do it for them. They just need to post the update, and my code under the hood will handle the email template preparation and distrubtion.

Before, I would have just banged this out with an S-control, but I thought I'd try this out with a combination of Apex and VisualForce pages instead. So I added a "Send Alert" button to the Case detail record page layout, and now I'm fighting the learning curve to implent this functionality in Visualforce.

I've poured through wikis, webinars and documentation posted on the Apex Developer Net forums. My mind loses all track of the passage of time, including recollection of when I last slept, when I last ate, when I last interacted with the human race. Still, I've learned a lot, and my "Send Alert Notification" components and pages are looking pretty slick.

I have to shift gears now, because I've been doing all my development (so far) in a production environment ... so naughty, I know. Last night, I hit a wall and realized I needed to create a new Apex Class, and it took me way too long to realize that the reason I couldn't make one was because I wasn't in a Developer edition or sandbox. Ooops.

I haven't done enough with the Sandbox, so now I need to go study up on it. I'll come back and share what I learn.