Chrome Extension – Force.com Utility Belt for Saleforce.com
August 26th, 2010
I built the Chrome Extension Salesforce.com ID Converter last month and found it quite useful. I consistently need to check out the Salesforce.com developer guides (especially Apex and Visualforce) so I started on another extension to make my development tasks easier, the Force.com Utility Belt.
The extension quickly grew in functionality so I thought I would ask other developers and admins for suggestions on how to make it more useful. It currently has the following features:
- Quick reference for Apex, Visualforce and Visualforce components
- Converts 15 digit Salesforce IDs to 18 digit IDs
- Quick link to open the Salesforce.com developer documentation page.
I hope to make the extension public soon but want to make some improvements first. I’m thinking about adding some sort of search functionality but how would you improve this extension? What features would you like to see?
Categories: Google, Salesforce
Is it possible to make the tool searchable?
two different ways to implement
1. select guide, enter search term (probably makes more sense)
2. Just search and return results from all 3 guides (results probably not as user friendly since they will jump from guide to guide)
Sorry…I just drooled a bit. This is VERY cool. I usually keep the Apex and Visualforce reference PDFs open all day long…I would switch to something like this in a heartbeat.
I have no idea what’s possible in a Chrome extension…so bear with me. One idea…provide the ability to search the force.com discussion boards?? Maybe even automatically search discussion boards based on the topic I’m looking?? So if I’m looking at the apex:inputField component, automagically show any discussion posts related to apex:inputField?
Thanks for building such a cool utility. Let us know when it’s available for public use.
Great ideas!
A really nice extension, thats far better than bookmarks. I really liked the categorization of sfdc documentation. My suggestion would be to have, some way to pull/reference code snippets from snipplr.com etc.
As a developer I frequently log into users accounts for testing. I’m not sure how much can be done with chrome extensions yet, but is it possible to have a list of roles/profiles to login to; or an easy way to search for users in the org without going to the home page?
You may want to look at this extension: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/60438
I’ve found it incredibly useful. Maybe you and that guy could put your heads together and make a joint extension.
Hmm, could you make it open source? Also, do you cache the Salesforce docs? What always gets me is the loading time when I open up the docs for reference. If we could also link to another source for more advanced examples (e.g. for actionFunctions, etc.) that would be fantastic since there are a number of things that one can do with some of the Visualforce elements that are not in the docs (not to mention bugs).
@Joel Making it opensource might be a pretty good idea. My Javascript skills aren’t near as good as yours so you could probably show me a few things. Right now, the links to the different topics are hard coded but I generate them out of a database. Nothing is cached as I simply callout to the Salesforce docs. I just hooked up some additional search functionality for their docs and such. Give me a week or so and I’ll have some more.
Still looking for additional functionality ideas.
Jeff, great work, will definitely download when available, assuming it does not slow done browser speed. All the suggestions posted here would be very useful as well. Would be great to have a search function and snipplr.com integration.
Hi Jeff,
Looks great. One huge annoyance of using Salesforce in Chrome is that the in-browser code editors (Setup->Develop), with their fancy code completion and syntax highlighting, don’t work in Chrome…the editor doesn’t gracefully degrade, it just isn’t usable. Fixing the full features would be a big project, but if the extension could just replace the broken fancy editor with a straight up, standard text area–that would be phenomenal and probably not too hard. (Now, if you could make the Developer Mode Edit Page pane work in Chrome, you would be a god…)
This is great stuff. A couple of things that I would find very useful:
1. Integration of the Firefox plugin mentioned above (to speed up navigation of the set-up menus)
2. Ability to search the developer discussion boards
Nirvana might be to be able to quickly switch to a hosted version of the Force.com Explorer, automatically authenticating from the org you are in. Obviously this goes beyond a chrome plugin and would better sit in the product itself…
Also, functionality like Maildrop ( http://www.pocketsoap.com/osx/maildrop/ ) but for webpages – to allow webpage content to be saved as an activity – would be fantastic… but that should really be in a *different* extension (not developer-focused). I could see it working like the Evernote extensions where you can save the whole page or the text that is being selected.
Jeff, this is awesome. I spend too much time looking up Visualforce components.
Search capabilities for the boards would be great. I like the idea of snipplr integration. Some way of managing all of my SFDC logins and API keys would be useful too.