Awesome Lightning, Visualforce and JS development in the Blaze R4

What is the chance that developing for Salesforce you never work on Lightning components or Visualforce pages? Bet, it's pretty small! And while the main Salesforce development hype topic has changed from Lightning to Salesforce DX, the Lightning itself grows with every Salesforce release and conquers more and more applications in Salesforce. So what? This is the great reason for us to provide you with a completely new Code Completion functionality for the Javascript, Lightning and Visualforce markup! As a bonus we've also added 'Scheduled Jobs' monitoring and creation to the IDE!

Code Assistance in the Lightning and Visualforce markup

Let's see what we have implemented in the Lightning editor:

• Code Completion in the Lightning editor will show aura-specific tags and their attributes together with the regular HTML tags in the suggestions list
• Added information from the documentation for Aura markup tags in the completions list
• Added Code Completion functionality for special shortcuts in Aura attributes - for example "v." and "c."

So it's not only Lightning, who gets better, but our Lightning support as well.

At the same time, Visualforce is still used heavily in most of Salesforce implementations, so Visualforce editor has been as well updated in The Welkin Suite Blaze R4 with the following functionality:

• Added Visualforce tags and attributes to the Code Completion database, so now working with a markup is much faster, comparing to what it was before
• Basic information from Salesforce's reference for Visualforce is available as a part of the Code Completion
• Updated the Visualforce editor to distinguish different 'flavors' of the HTML markup - HTML4, HTML5 and XHTML

Using these improvements to the Code Assistance for markup you will be able to develop much faster and you'll have to remember much less information from the documentation than before.

Javascript Code Completion

Of course, when you are working on developing fully functional and shiny frontend for some of your Salesforce logic, this requires Javascript coding. Starting from the Blaze R4 version of The Welkin Suite you will have a great code completion options for Javascript! The cool thing here is that the code completion will be available everywhere - in Static Resources, in Aura bundles, and within HTML or Visualforce pages. So what's inside?

• Implemented full Javascript code completion everywhere - in Javascript files, withing Lightning, Visualforce, and HTML markup, in Lightning Javascript files
• Significantly increased a number of completions in our completions database for Javascript
• Added details from the documentation for Javascript completions in the editors
• Added information about the Aura framework to the Code Completion
• Added more details for the input parameters of controller's and renderer's functions for components, events, and helpers

While these changes that are described in the list above do not provoke you to say "WOW!" - sure you'll say this when you will start working with Javascript, Lightning, and Visualforce in the new version of The Welkin Suite Blaze!

Creating and monitoring your Apex Scheduled Jobs

No matter if you're a developer or Salesforce administrator, while this separation of roles is correct in many cases, there are a lot of situations when both devs and admins do the same stuff - working with Apex Scheduled Jobs is one of them.
You have developed a new scheduled job and need to schedule it for a long-running testing? You've extended the logic in an existing scheduled job and need to execute it one time to reprocess previous records? Or you need to schedule recently deployed jobs? Or, even, need to additionally execute a scheduled job after importing some data to your Organization?
All of these questions are pretty real and common, so why not do all of these tasks directly from the IDE instead of going to the Salesforce's Setup menu! Even more, if you're an admin and don't write Apex - it's better to complete these tasks without any code and without asking your fellow team members for help! We don't see any reasons why this should not be implemented as a part of The Welkin Suite IDE, so meet our new 'Scheduled Jobs' pad for The Welkin Suite for Mac!

In the 'Scheduled Jobs' pad, you can see the list of all Apex Scheduled Jobs from your organization with the additional information like a previous and next scheduled run time, who and when have submitted this job, etc.

Also, you can always open any job directly in Salesforce UI from its context menu selecting the 'Open in browser' option, for example, to get an information about a class that is executed as a part of the job since Salesforce does not provide this via API's. Using the same context menu, you can delete any job from the list.

As we're aware of the situations when just a few hours before the deadline you're running out of API calls in your development environment or sandbox - we'd like to do our best to not make it worse, so by default information in the 'Scheduled Jobs' pad is not refreshed automatically. You can do this manually using the 'Refresh Jobs' button, or you can use the 'Settings' option and configure the pad to refresh the list automatically at certain intervals.

However, the most interesting part of this functionality is hidden right under the 'New' button, which allows you to schedule new jobs in a lot of different ways, but we'll go through them in details in just a couple seconds. Before specifying a schedule for your job first you need to enter its name and select one of the classes that implement the Schedulable interface from the appropriate dropdown list. Once you've done this you can proceed with one of the scheduling options below:

• 'Run' - after selecting this option you can choose one of the 3 child options: run once at a preferred start time, run now, and run every X minutes, hours, or days. Please note, that if you select running a job every X minutes, the IDE will create multiple scheduled jobs (being more precise - 60 divided by X jobs), however this is a very good option when you are going to execute your class very often.

  

• 'Weekly' - using this option will allow you to schedule your job to be executed every weekday, weekend, or on certain days of the week.

• 'Monthly' - provides you with an ability to execute your job every month on certain days, like the 19th of every month, or for example, every second Monday and Wednesday.

  

• 'Advanced' - you can use this to configure your own schedule for a job using a Cron expression.

After everything is set up, you will see an Apex code that the IDE will execute to schedule the job you've configured. You can also copy this code and share it with your teammates if needed. For example, if scheduling a job to be executed every 5 minutes the IDE will create 12 jobs because of Salesforce's limitations, and it is much handier to share this code with someone, instead of typing it every time 

Of course, if the configured schedule causes multiple scheduled jobs, the IDE will notify you about this in the status bar of the window.

Other changes

As a part of The Welkin Suite Blaze R4 release we have also fixed some of the issues that were found by our community - you can find the full list of changes in the list below.

We believe this changes will help you being more productive and you'll enjoy them - and we will enjoy even more if you would leave us your feedback on the new features of this release, so we can make it even better with your help! By the way, are you ready for the SalesforceDX? It's coming to The Welkin Suite Blaze pretty soon 

Full list of changes

New features:

• Added the 'Scheduled Jobs' panel for monitoring and creating Apex Scheduled Jobs
• Implemented the Code Completion functionality in the Lightning editor for aura-specific tags and their attributes
• Implemented full Javascript code completion in Javascript files, withing Lightning, Visualforce, and HTML markup, in Lightning Javascript files
• Added Visualforce tags and attributes to the Code Completion database

Improvements:

• Added information from the documentation for Aura markup tags in the completions list
• Added Code Completion functionality for special shortcuts in Aura attributes (like "v." and "c.")
• Implemented displaying of a basic information from Salesforce's reference for Visualforce in the completions list
• Updated the Visualforce editor to distinguish different 'flavors' of the HTML markup - HTML4, HTML5, and XHTML
• Significantly increased a number of completions in our completions database for Javascript
• Added details from the documentation for Javascript completions in the editors
• Added information about the Aura framework to the Code Completion for Javascript files in Lightning Bundles
• Added more details for the input parameters of controller's and renderer's functions for components, events, and helpers in Javascript
• Significantly improved the performance of the sObject inspector if working with a lot of fields in an object

Fixes:

• Fixed the issue related to the inappropriate 'Please pull first' build error when building Visualforce-related items
• Fixed rare crashes of the application when clicking through the project tree in the Solution Explorer
• Fixed the always-failing validation against production organizations, because of unchecked and disabled 'Rollback on error' setting for all validations
• Fixed the inability to resolve conflicts during the pull process when there were conflicts in a '-meta.xml' file in a TWS project and on an organization
• Fixed rare TWS crashes after enabling code coverage highlighting
• Fixed TWS crashes after expanding the objects which contain specific Workflow Rules in the Admin Panel
• Resolved the case when the IDE was blocked after deleting the license information from the system file in case if the last opened project was opened automatically after starting TWS
• Fixed rare issues related to saving a file on closing its tab which might have affected performance in a minor way