July 15, 2012  

Using ConvertAll to convert a List of an Object to a List of another Object

Let’s say you have two classes, one called Car and one called Automobile. Inside Car you have a method that performs an explicit conversion of an Automobile to a Car:

public static explicit operator Car(Automobile automobile)
{
    return new Car {
            Name = automobile.Name,
            Make = automobile.Make,
            Model = automobile.Model,
            Year = automobile.Year
            };
}

Now, say we also want a method that will take a List<Automobile> and convert it to a List<Car>. Instead of doing something like this:

public static List ConvertToCar(this List automobiles)
{
    List cars = new List();
    foreach(var a in automobile) {
        cars.Add((Car) a);
    }
    return cars;
}

We can simplify it to this:

public static List ConvertToCar(this List automobiles)
{
    return automobiles.ConvertAll(a=>(Car) a);
}
July 6, 2012  

Simulating SQL’s SELECT * In Salesforce

So after spending some time tinkering with trying to write a query along the lines of SELECT * FROM Contact and continuously getting an error, I realized the Salesforce  doesn’t use the asterisk to retrieve all  fields for a given object. Therefore, I had to take the long way around writing a query for selecting all fields.

First, we are going to be using DescribeSObject in SforceService to get a list of all fields for a given object. Note that Contact should be replaced with whatever your object is. 

DescribeSObjectResult describeSObjectResult = 
     binding.describeSObject("Contact");

Once we have that, we are going to loop through that array and append it with a comma until we have a string with all of our fields.

public string GetAllFieldsForObject(DescribeSObjectResult describeSObjectResult)
{
     StringBuilder fields = new StringBuilder();
     for(int i = 0; i < describeSObjectResult.fields.Length; i++)
     {
         fields.Append(describeSObjectResult.fields[i].name);
         if( i != describeSObjectResult.fields.Length - 1)
         {
              fields.Append(", ");
         }
     return fields.ToString();
     }
}

Now, we can use that string in out SELECT statement, like so:

string query = 
     String.Format("SELECT {0} FROM {1}", GetAllFieldsForObject(describeSObjectResult), myObject);
July 1, 2012  

Finally Putting This To Use

So after owning www.jvavrk.com for around 3 or 4 years, I’ve finally decided to make something of this place.

Obligatory for a developer’s blog:

namespace JvavrikBlog
{
     public class FirstPost
     {
          static void Main(string[] args)
          {
               Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
          }
     }
}

Also, here is a new Testament song, off their album Dark Roots of Earth, which hits the US July 31st.