Lost Data?

I have a client who recently discovered that they had an inbound integration overwriting some important opportunity data in Salesforce.  Unfortunately, the field that was being overwritten was not a field that had tracking turned on as they had reached their limit of 20 fields.

Salesforce has put together a nice checklist of things you can do to try to recover lost or deleted data.  For my client, the suggestions weren't options to consider because the data updates were incremental over a long period of time.

However, we didn't give up, and were able to recover some of the data from workflow emails!  The attribute that they thought they had lost was part of the Won email that was sent out and because the administrator was copied on these emails, we just had to figure out a way to extract the data we wanted to recover.  Turns out if you can get your email into Outlook, Access has a way to import email messages.  Once the emails are in Access, a few little queries can fetch the data you might need.  For us, we just needed the link to the opportunity and a value from the email template.  Once the query fetched the data we wanted, a little scrubbing in Excel cleansed the rows for import.

TL;DR: you might be able to recover lost data from your workflow emails!

Salesforce1 list views and Flexipages

Issue: List Views are not displayed by default in Salesforce1 tabs

Part of the Salesforce1 mobile app is a design decision that makes visible in the mobile app only the list views that a user had previously run in the Salesforce.com application.  We were caught by surprise with this "feature" when we rolled out a new mobile app on Salesforce1.  Our mobile users didn't see any of the list views we had created for them in the main application, because they are primarily mobile users, and it was only through trial-and-error did we discover what was going on.  We were able to corroborate our experience when we saw this idea.

Some of the possible workarounds we explored:

Pinned List Views:
While we knew that this would be self-correcting over time, we thought about some alternatives that were mentioned in that thread.  One suggestion was to use "pinned list views", or PLVs, which I had not heard of before.  PLVs were introduced in the Winter 14 release as part of the Service Cloud console. We're not Service Cloud users so it was not a viable workaround for us.

Flexipages:
The other idea, that was suggested was to implement "Flexipages".  Flexipages were introduced in the Salesforce1 developer guide, chapter 15, as "a middle ground between page layouts and visualforce pages".  After working with these, I'm not sure I agree.  I'm not even sure I'd say that this feature isn't a beta as the procedure for developing and deploying feels half-baked.  Here are some of the key takeaways:

1. There is neither a gui section in the Setup menu for flexipages nor a way to create a flexipage using the developer console.  I did my "dev" with Notepad.  I took the example xml and changed it for my custom object in my text editor and saved it as .xml.

2. My flexipage just need two things: an "All" items list view and a "Recent" items list view.  The docs are unclear how you achieve this but basically you reference your application's list views by name.  For example, if you have a list view in Salesforce.com with a Name "All_Records", your flexipage.xml should have something like this:

<componentInstanceProperties>

<name>filterName</name>

<value>All_Records</value>

</componentInstanceProperties>

3. According to the docs, the flexipages are deployable from the force.com ide.  I upgraded my ide and did not see any reference to flexipages.  Could be an ide update issue but for the sake of time I ended up using workbench to deploy my package.  Just zip up your package and include an updated package.xml like what is described in the api documentation:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Package xmlns="http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata">
    <fullName>Travel, Inc.</fullName>
    <types>
        <members>TravelIncFlexiPage</members>
        <name>CustomTab</name>
    </types>
    <types>
        <members>TravelIncFlexiPage</members>
        <name>FlexiPage</name>
    </types>
    <types>
        <members>TravelIncQuickActions</members>
        <name>QuickAction</name>
    </types>
    <version>29.0</version>
</Package>

4. It took a few tries for me to deploy the package in workbench but when it finally went through, the last few steps to expose the page in the Salesforce1 app were straightforward.  Just add a flexipage tab and then add the tab to your mobile navigation as described in the developer guide.

5. Any updates to your flexipage require you to reload your flexipage xml.  Ugh.  Hopefully you remember where you backed it up and be sure to buy your admin a beer as they're going to hate deploying this.