Defaulting your mailto: links to Google Apps in Firefox 3

Tim Parker

If you're using Google Apps and Firefox and would like to default email links to open in Google Apps follow the steps below.

First, make sure you're using Firefox 3. Open Firefox, and enter about:config into the address bar. This will bring up a warning message, click on the "I'll be careful, I promise!" button.

First, we need to edit the option for web pages to register themselves as protocol handlers, so enter gecko.handler in the filter bar and select the option highlighted below.

gecko.handlerService.allowRegisterFromDifferenceHost

Make sure this option is set to True (You can do so by double clicking that entry in the browser). This allows mailto: links to forward to web based email providers such as Google Apps. If you wanted to set webcal: links to a web based calendar like Google Calendar you would need this setting enabled as well.

Now that we've enabled this option we need to register Google Apps as a handler. To do this, we need to execute a single line of JavaScript. In the address bar, copy and paste the following:

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler('mailto','https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s','Google Apps')

Note that you will need to replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name. Firefox will prompt you to add an application. Click "Add Application."

Finally, Navigate to Tools / Options / Applications and set Google Apps as your default for mailto.

FIrst look at Dynamic APEX

Kyle
Roche

I opened a case in my Dev org a few days ago to request that Dynamic APEX be enabled. I took my first look at it today. The first step required to take a look at Dynamic APEX is to open a case in your development org. It took about 48 hours to get the setting enabled. The rest of this post and the follow up posts assume that step has been completed.

Start by creating a new Visualforce page. I'm using a page called /apex/dynamicApex. I created a custom controller called dynamicApexController by changing the <apex:page> component as follows:

<apex:page controller="dynamicApexController">

Let's start with the controller. Switch your editor to the controller view and add the following APEX Property. As in my previous posts, I'm using APEX Properties in place of the old getters / setters. For more information on APEX Properties see the Summer 08 Developer's Guide.

public List<Account> DynamicAccountList
{
get
{
if (DynamicAccountList == null)
{
string myDynamicQuery = 'select id,name from Account limit 10';
DynamicAccountList = Database.Query(myDynamicQuery);
}
return DynamicAccountList;
}
set;
}

Now, this is obviously a basic example. I'll extend this using some more complicated situations in the coming posts. Since we have Dynamic APEX enabled we can now use Dynamic SOQL, SOQL and DML. We're creating a string to hold our Dynamic SOQL query. We can then pass the string to be evaluated at runtime to the Database.Query() method. The possibilities for customization are endless.

To display the results on the Visualforce Page add a quick dataTable component.

<apex:dataTable value="{!DynamicAccountList}" var="acct">
<apex:column value="{!acct.id}"></apex:column>
<apex:column value="{!acct.name}"></apex:column>
</apex:dataTable>

We'll look at some examples of dynamic queries built on user input in the following posts in this series.

Google Geocoding from Visualforce

Kyle
Roche

Mashups are becoming a common part of most implementations. Replacing legacy applications are sometimes phased into adoption by creating a mashup in Salesforce.com of the current application(s) and slowly replacing components as they are reconstructed using native Salesforce. Google Maps Mashups are among the most popular. However, we found most of the examples were either using the AJAX toolkit or were hard coding the Lattitude / Longitude coordinates. In this example, we'll demonstrate how to use Google's Geocoding API to geocode an Account address from with your Visualforce controller. The key difference is that this example geocodes the address using server side scripting.

Start off by creating a new APEX Class called GoogleGeocodeExtension. This will be our controller extension. Remember, controller extensions have constructors that take an argument of controller for which they are extending. In this example, we'll be extending the standard controller for the Account object. Make sure your class looks like the following.

public class GoogleGeocodeExtension {
private final Account acct;

public GoogleGeocodeExtension (ApexPages.StandardController stdController) {
this.acct = (Account)stdController.getRecord();
}
}

Google's Geocoding API can be accessed via server side scripting. You can choose different output formats like XML, CSV, JSON (default). In our case, we'll keep things simple and return the results in CSV format. Add the following property to your APEX class.

public string[] Coordinates
{
get
{
if (Coordinates == null)
{
Account myAccount = [select name,billingstreet,billingcity,billingstate,billingpostalcode from Account where id=:acct.id];
String url = 'http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?';
url += 'q=' + EncodingUtil.urlEncode(myAccount.BillingStreet,'UTF-8') + ',' + EncodingUtil.urlEncode(myAccount.BillingCity,'UTF-8') + ',' + myAccount.BillingState;
url += '&output=csv&key=yourgooglemapkeyhere';

Http h = new Http();
HttpRequest req = new HttpRequest();

req.setHeader('Content-type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
req.setHeader('Content-length', '0');
req.setEndpoint(url);
req.setMethod('POST');

HttpResponse res = h.send(req);
String responseBody = res.getBody();
Coordinates = responseBody.split(',',0);
}
return Coordinates;
}
set;
}

This APEX property queries the billing address for the Account record and passes it to the Google Geocoding API. Because spaces and other special characters can appear in addresses and city names we need to use the urlEncode() method to properly format these strings.

We chose to use the CSV format on our response. So, we simply need to split the string by the comma delimiter so we can access each field individually. To keep things simple you can add the following two properties to your controller extension.

public string CoordinateLat { get { return Coordinates[2]; } }
public string CoordinateLong { get { return Coordinates[3]; } }

Like any other APEX property in a controller or extension you can access these in your Visualforce page using the standard binding syntax {!CoordinateLat}.