Does anyone know of a good SOFT resource salesforce.com?
I've searched for a decent guide to the SOQL query language for Salesforce.com and a schema for my tables, but I can't find anything that is remotely decent. Does anyone know how I will get the documents?
I have a good book on the subject sitting on my desk at work, unfortunately I'm at home now. Once I arrive at work tomorrow morning (UK), I will edit this answer to provide more details.
This book is called the Force.com Cookbook , published by Salesforce itself. It is available for free from this link. Here are the chapters:
- Beginning of work
- Application development on demand
- Guidelines for Writing S-Controls
- Apex writing guidelines
- Finding and Querying Data
- Improving data quality
- Custom buttons and links
- Customizing Salesforce Pages and Fields
- Integration with other services
- Writing Web Controls and Client Applications
- Debugging S-Controls and Apex
- Packaging an App for AppExchange
- Getting Started with VisualForce
There are dozens of examples and discussions on SOQL in the book, this is actually too much code. But I learned a lot of good things.
For the details of your specific Salesforce schema (each configured) you should look at the WSDL that is generated for you. I've also used a couple of applications shown here .
The Salesforce.com Web Services API Docs contains reference documents for SOQL, and has many samples.
SOQL link
While developing a custom solution against the Salesforce API, I got a lot of help decrypting Salesforce database tables, custom objects and SOQL (including examples) behind the scenes - this is sforce Explorer; http://sforce.sourceforge.net/
Nothing looks like SQL Server Enterprise or the new Management Studio tools, it's actually a tiny application. This helps to get rid of confusion.
To sign in and use sforce Explorer, you need a Salesforce developer account or a corporate account with API access (and token).
If you have any specific questions about SOQL that are not answered here, you can check the developer message boards at: http://community.salesforce.com/sforce?category.id=developers
The Schema Browser is now included in the Configure UI, see http://blogs.developerforce.com/developer-relations/2011/10/an-erd-is-worth-a-thousand-words-schema-builder-in -winter-12.html .