My experience taking Spring 13 Maintenance Release Exam

First of all, sorry for being away from the blog for so long.  I have been laying very low the last two months.  After spending almost a month in Asia on holiday, I am feeling rested.

I received some emails from Salesforce last week, letting me know it's time I took my Spring 2013 Maintenance Exam for both of my certifications.

I first went to the Release Training site and noticed this time around there were only three tutorials:  Chatter, Sales Cloud and Data.com.  I was a little taken back.  That's it?  Last release there were 6 training tutorials, I thought.  I followed the instructions given in the email for my Administrator Release Exam and studied these topics, using the training provided.

• Describe the considerations for setting up the beta version of State and Country Picklists
• Describe the capabilities of Forecasts
• Describe the capabilities of Chatter Tasks
• Describe the enhancements to Chatter
• Describe the enhancements to Salesforce for Outlook

That was not too bad.  I went through the tutorials twice and went for the exam.  The questions were straightforward.  If you go through the training once or twice, you should be ready for the exam.

After completing the Adminstrator Release Exam, I turned to my Force.com Developer Release Exam.  I read the email and read through the topics to be covered in the exam:

• Describe the considerations for setting up the beta version of State and Country Picklists
• Describe the use cases for criteria-based sharing
• Describe the implications of organization-wide defaults
• Describe object relationships in Salesforce
• Describe the features of the Salesforce multitenant architecture

Now I was really taken aback. Only the first bullet is new to Spring 2013.  The other four bullets all seem to be old topics.  This email (unlike the old for Admin) also provides a list of topics that it advises us to study in detail before the exam:

• Overview of Object Relationships
• Considerations for Relationships
• Creating Custom Object Sharing Rules
• Criteria-Based Sharing Rules Overview
• Securing Data Access
• Overview of Sharing Settings
• Setting Your Organization-Wide Sharing Defaults

I decided to go through all these topics from the Help and Training site.  Maybe there were something new to this release in these area that I was not aware of.  Nothing.  Nothing's changed.  I was really starting to wonder if there were printing errors in the email.

I thought, well, OK, I haven't looked at these topics for awhile, so I will just do what is outlined in the exam guide.  I spent a few hours going through all the above Help topics and then went for the exam.

Boy was I glad.  I am sure I would've passed the Release Exam anyway even if I didn't study for it, but by re-familiarizing myself with these old topics, I finished the exam a lot quicker than I think I would have if I didn't study.  I finished the exam in about 25 seconds and submitted, and done!

The moral of this story is simply that, make sure you follow the study guideline, and you will pass the exams with flying colours!!

New "Geolocation" data type

[Updated:  2012-11-14

I apologize I made a typo.  My original post had the fields to be
Location_Latitude__s and Location_Longitude__s.

They should instead be

Location__Latitude__s and Location__Longitude__s.

Note the two underline characters between your field name and the "Latitude__s" or "Longitude__s" portion instead of one as I originally posted.  I have already updated my code below.

]

Currently the new Geolocation data type is fairly limited.  I'll let you read the limitations here.

However, there are a few things to note.

1. a Geolocation field is actually a component field.  It contains 2 pieces of information, Latitude and Longitude (and also an internally used information which is not exposed to us users or developers.)

2. you can use either degrees or decimal places to describe your location.  However, it is important to note that Salesforce always uses the decimal point version.  The degree option is purely for representation purposes.  In fact, when you're entering a geolocation information, you are entering the values in decimal places, and then it'll be displayed as degrees after the data is saved.  The decimal point version is probably the easier way to go.

3. If you have a custom field of this type, say, Location__c, as you know, this is a component field that actually contains 2 pieces of information.  In your SOQL, if you need to access the latitude or longitude, all you need to do is to drop the "__c", and instead append it with "__Latitude__s" or "__Longitude__s".  For example,

SELECT Location__Latitude__s, Location__Longitude__s FROM
Person LIMIT 1;

4. Seems to me the only main thing you can now do is to calculate the distance between two points.  You now have 2 new SF functions to use, Distance() and Geolocation().  However, Geolocation() cannot be used alone.  It is always used in conjunction with Distance().  You may want to refer to the manual for more information.  The manual probably explains the usage better than I can.  NOTE:  I am able to use Distance() in the WHERE clause of a SOQL, but I have not been able to use it in the SELECT clause of the SOQL.  I will look further into it.

Using the standard Name field

Be careful what you save in the Name field - it is a text field, so if you have Names that are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, then if you sort them, 1 is followed by 10 instead of 2.  If you really need to treat them as numbers, use a custom field of the Number type instead.

What I intend to cover in this blog.....

I received my Force.com Developer and Administrator certifications, and I plan to keep going to take the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud Consultant Certification exams, so this blog will have a combination of everything there is to know and learn about Salesforce.com.  I'm going to use tags to distinguish between topics, and I hope that will be helpful!!

Trust me, some of these posts will be very very beginner's information but I will also try to post something that are more advanced as time goes on.

My First Post

Today is 11 September 2012 (wow has it been 11 years already....?)

After passing my Salesforce Force.com Developer exam in April, I kept studying Salesforce and as of yesterday I had also passed my Salesforce Administration exam.

I finally decided it's time I put together what I have learned in a blog.  So this is what this blog site is going to be about.

kk