Force.com Explorer (beta) for Adobe Air Available
July 29th, 2010
A copy of the new Force.com Developer News arrived in my inbox this morning with some interesting news. An Adobe Air (beta) of the Force.com Explorer has been released for people to begin playing with. If you missed the newsletter, you can catch Jon Mountjoy's blog post with the announcement. Jon writes more eloquently than me due to his enchanting accent. You should give the app a whirl as it’s off to a good start. You can download it here.
I was quite excited to see how the Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com was coming along since I developed a small app with the toolkit last January. I took a peek at the docs and they’ve made some really nice progress. However, the main reason I immediately downloaded the Force.com Explorer was to test out the functionality in hopes of a better tool. If you are a Mac user than you are blessed with the options of running Simon Fell’s SoqlXplorer in addition to the Force.com IDE for Eclipse. Neither one is quite the perfect tool. SoqlXplorer doesn’t let you drill into objects to build complex relationship queries like Eclipse but the Eclipse IDE doesn’t allow you to copy the resulting data from queries into your clipboard. I typically live in the SoqlXplorer all day. (Side note: not being able to copy results in the Eclipse IDE is frustrating but Job Plax, the Force.com IDE PM, told me that this feature just missed the last release so hopefully it will be in a future release.)
The Force.com Explorer is a breeze to install if you already have Adobe Air and you can be up and running within seconds. It has a nice clean UI which looks a lot like the .NET Apex Explorer. It has most of the functionality that you find in the other SOQL query tool plus some:
- Filter objects by name
- Drill down into objects and relationships to create complex queries. Very similar in functionality to the Eclipse IDE
- Return results with child object that you can click on to drill into
- Copy the text from cells in the query results
- View metadata about the objects
- Query, query all and batch size options
- Right click on an object to view it of its metadata and save it as a PDF
- It remembers the fields you selected in previous objects to easily rebuild SOQL queries
Some issues that I found right away (BTW… email any issues or requests to developerforce@salesforce.com):
- I was not able to log into any sandbox orgs
- I had a problem printing the object report but could download it as a PDF with no problems.
- It crashed a couple of times while trying to create complex queries
- It was not able to construct queries with parent-to-child relationships and if I did manually enter them the results came back null.
View Child Records Inline
View Metadata about an Object
Categories: Salesforce
ROFL @ enchanting accent. Thanks for the write up!
Please send me the queries that failed, and how the complex query building broke – I’ll get them seen to.
I can log onto sandbox orgs just fine – did you change the endpoint to Sandbox?
Glad you like the tool. We still have a way to go with it -in particular adding output features – but it’s already useful.
Cheers,
Jon
[...] to see some of the fruits from this joint venture. Salesforce.com released a beta version of the Force.com Explorer on Adobe Air a couple of days ago and I caught an interesting tweet from Jeff Grosse about a new video on the [...]
Nice write up!.. To login to a sandbox, you will have to click the small arrow next to “Advanced options” in the login screen.. The advanced settings reset themselves to production everytime the explorer is opened..
I worked with Jon Mountjoy to figure out what was going on. As you say, you have to click the “Advanced options” selector to set the environment. However, you also have to hit the “OK” button before loggin in. I was just selecting Sandbox and then hitting Login. I believe Jon is going to make some modifications.
I submitted some feedback to them on the tool. While it’s a great start, it obviously has a way to go. As far as sandboxes, you need to choose Advanced, change the URL, and click Apply. THEN, you can Login. Here are some of my “findings”.
- The URL for logging in doesn’t retain the value from the last session, though the login does. It should be retained so that we don’t try to use Sandbox for Production or vice-versa.
- The field list presented for an object isn’t in Alpha sequence so it’s difficult to find the fields you want.
- The field list presented is the Label for the field. But that can be confusing sometimes when labels don’t necessarily match to API names or you have 2 labels with the same name. Suggest a toggle allowing us to choose API name or Label name.
- I accidently created a query to Select ID From Account. We have over 1M Accounts and this never returned a result. It should have timed out after a certain amount of time.
- It’s nice that I can copy a field to the clipboard or open in a browser, but it would be nice if the row or entire grid being copied were options as well.
Just tested the latest version of this (0.54) and they have fixed some of the issues with previous versions. HOWEVER, I’ve found 2 more:
- When you process a Query with “Limit”, it processes the query. But if you add a field after that, it strips the LIMIT off. If you aren’t careful, you can perform a global scan.
- Fields are returned in the grid in field name sequence; not in the sequence requested.
- Still can’t copy results to the clipboard.
- If you process a long query there is no way to cancel. Additionally, if you leave the screen to look at another window, when you return, your mouse is not a wait icon any longer so it isn’t obvious it’s still running. Your only clue is that the query button is disabled.