Login with Facebook for a community with Visualforce

Adding an auth provider (e.g., Login with Facebook) to a Salesforce Communities instance is pretty easy.

The Login with ... button is pretty magical: It knows what community you're logging into, and it knows what URL you're trying to access upon authentication. Based on that information when you click the button, you're taken to the correct authentication URL based on the Auth Provider configuration in Salesforce.

But... for orgs that have customized their login pages with Visualforce, how do you add this button? Luckily, adding the same magical button to a custom Visualforce login page doesn't require you to manually reconstruct the OAuth authentication endpoint. Instead, you can just use the AuthConfiguration.getAuthProviderSsoUrl() method.

Simply put, you need just three things:

• Your community's base URL
• The relative path after the base URL to which the user should be taken upon successful authentication. This is also known as the startUrl.
• The URL Suffix (a.k.a. DeveloperName) of your auth provider (e.g., Facebook) as configured in Salesforce

Once you have this information, all you need to do is create an action in your Apex controller that returns a PageReference object, constructed from the URL returned by AuthConfgiuration.getAuthProviderSsoUrl().

This same approach can be applied to other auth providers as well, such as Twitter or Google.

AuthConfiguration.getAuthProviderSsoUrl(String, String, String) explained

Curious about AuthConfiguration.getAuthProviderSsoUrl(String, String, String)? Here are some notes about the parameters that may not be apparent the first time you read the documentation.

String cUrl

You'll want this to match exactly what you see when you're looking at your community's Administration Settings. Don't add any extra trailing slashes!

String startUrl

This should be the URL relative to the value you put for cUrl, including the leading forward-slash ('/'). For example, if you want to land the user at the Home tab, startUrl should be set to "/home/home.jsp" (again, note the inclusion of the leading forward-slash).

Think about it this way: If you concatenate cUrl and startUrl, exactly as written, you should end up with a valid URL to the desired page or resource within your community.

String developerName

This is the DeveloperName field from the AuthProvider object. Or, you can find the value by looking at the URL Suffix field on the Auth Provider detail page.

You can find this value dynamically by querying the AuthProvider object.

Add, edit and remove parent and child records in Lightning component

After figuring out that I could leverage indexVar and custom data-* attributes to efficiently remove items from a list in Lightning, I decided to see whether the same component pattern could be applied to enable dynamic management of lists at a parent object level and at a child object level.

In the screenshot above (please excuse the ugly styles), the behavior is such that when a user clicks Edit for an account, the list of contacts changes to show only contacts for the selected account.

The basic building blocks of this app are the ns:manageAccounts and ns:manageContacts components, added to the Lightning application as follows:


And within both components, the following pattern is used:


The above concepts are simplified in their illustration, as the full setup also uses several custom events and event handlers. Please take a look at the oneAccount.app repo on GitHub for the full source code behind the sample app.

Lightning really appears to makes dynamic UI updates really simple for the developer, similar to other frameworks like Knockout. The real benefit of Lightning is that it's built directly on top of Salesforce, and as a result makes it easy to leverage the power of Apex in your apps and components.

Simple Lightning-to-Lead tutorial for the Salesforce1 Platform

If you're brand new to Lightning on the Salesforce1 Platform, and you're having a bit of trouble following the cool but relatively complex Expenses sample app from the Lightning Components Developer's Guide, maybe this Lightning-to-Lead tutorial will work better for you.

The goal is simple: Create a one-page app that basically does what Web-to-Lead does, which is to create a new Lead record. Nothing glorious, but it's just complicated enough to go over some core concepts. When you're done, you'll end up with a simple page with a few fields and a lone button.

Sound simple? Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Share Chatter files across communities... or not

"One version of the truth" is the holy grail in content management. Chatter Files is salesforce.com's solution for allowing users to manage document revisions in Salesforce, while making sure that links to the file always give people the latest version. But with Communities, "one version of the truth" becomes more difficult to achieve.

Take the following scenario:

1. John Doe collaborates with internal users to create a pitch deck for a new product.
2. John uploads the file to the Competitive Advantage Chatter group in his org's internal community.
3. Several iterations later, the deck is ready to be shared in his company's partner community, called AllianceNet.
4. John uses the Global Header to switch from his org's internal community to the AllianceNet community.
5. John goes to the All AllianceNet group to share the file, already stored in Chatter, with the group, but... where's the file?

As it stands in Winter '15, files created or uploaded to one community, internal or external, can only be shared within that same community in Chatter. So, to share a file across communities, users effectively have to recreate a duplicate instance of the file by uploading it again as a new file to the new community.

The only way that files can be shared or seen across communities is to create a Salesforce CRM Content library that's shared with users who have access to multiple communities. But even then, users will not be able to attach the file to a Chatter post. They'll be able to find the file in Global Search, and share URL links to the file, but unfortunately "native" Chatter file attachments will not be possible.

If this limitation with file sharing across communities affects or bothers you, please promote the idea, "Sharing Files from Chatter to Communities".

Invalid apex:attribute name values

The apex:attribute component in Visualforce allows developers to pass custom Apex class instances as attributes from the parent component or page to the child component. In this manner, it's possible to pass a page controller itself as an attribute to a component on the page, using a simple self property like the following.

public CustomController getSelf() {
    return this;
}

What the documentation doesn't say is that apparently (at least in Winter '15, API 32.0) there are keywords to avoid when naming your attribute, even though the Visualforce parser will not tell you there's a problem.

Trying to name your attribute "controller" will cause something like the following error to appear when saving a page: Wrong type for attribute <c:buggersitepaypalcheckout controller="{!self}">. Expected BuggerSiteSimpleSelfRegController, found String

Trying to name your attribute "parent" will cause a completely blank error message to appear when saving a page. But it's an error that will prevent you from saving your page, nonetheless.

Do you know any other hidden no-no's with naming apex:attribute elements? Please share so that we can all avoid these frustrating quirks int he future.

Your request cannot be processed at this time. The site administrator has been alerted.

In setting up and testing self-registration for a new community built on Salesforce Communities, you may encounter this confounding error: "Your request cannot be processed at this time. The site administrator has been alerted."

"Alerted" in the above statement refers to an email alert that went out to the site administrator. But who is the "site administrator"? You can find the email address used for this notification by locating the Site Guest User for your community's Force.com site.

1. Open Setup > Manage Communities
2. Click Force.com for the community in question
3. Click Edit
4. Change Site Contact to the user who should receive notifications when errors arise with self-registration. Make sure the user's email address is valid.

For sandboxes, make sure your Access to Send Email is set to "All email", under Setup > Email Administration > Deliverability. (Thanks Lynnet!)

Below are a few common reasons why you may be encountering the problem:

• The community is not published. In case you're working with a community that is offline or in Preview status, you need to publish the community before self-registration will work.
• The Account Owner does not have a User Role assigned. If you're creating a new Account record on the fly, especially in B2C situations, you need to make sure you assign a default account owner that also has a User Role value. Any role will do, and you can use either a workflow rule or Apex to perform the assignment.
• The site guest user does not have Create and Read permissions on the Account and Contact objects. Edit Public Access Settings for the community's Force.com site to grant these permissions, along with field permissions for any fields that are included on the self-registration form. Note that by default the site's profile will not have these permissions.
• Self-registration is not enabled for the community. Go to Manage Communities, click Edit and make sure the Login settings show that self-registration is enabled.

For more details on setting up a community for self-registration, please refer to the Getting Started with Communities guide.