SalesForce.Com Issues/Gotchas aka. Bugs/Defects

SalesForce.Com Issues/Gotchas aka. Bugs/Defects

These are aspects of SalesForce/Apex [current version in-use as of the date of this post] that don’t actually conform to the general way one might expect this platform to behave.

The really cool thing is that none of these issues/gotchas/defects/bugs result in a lack of expected behavior without error/warning or comment.

• Cannot reference null values for <apex:outputText/> or <apex:inputText/>.

• This is to say whenever a null value is retrieved from a SOQL statement that value will cause the desired <apex:outputText/> or <apex:inputText/>.
• It seems the code responsible for rendering the <apex:outputText/> or <apex:inputText/> cannot function whenever the value being displayed is null – this is NOT the expected behavior since one can just as easily deal with rendering a null value by casting a null to String using the following code fragment: ”   ”+value_containing_null+”   “.

Cannot reference Datetime objects with <apex:outputText/> or <apex:inputText/>.

• This is to say the the only valid data type for Input/Output operations is a non-null String value, all other values will result in a lack of desired functionality.
• It seems the code responsible for rendering a non-String value cannot deal with a type cast to String – this is not such a huge problem as one might think since most OOP programming languages provide a method for rending any type to String however for some unexpected reason this is not the case with Apex.

Cannot retrieve the ApexPages.currentPage() more than exactly once because the associated information is lost for subsequent invocations.

• This is to say the ApexPages.currentPage() can only retrieve valid values for ApexPages.currentPage().getParameters() exactly once and never again; subsequent invocations will NOT provide the same values for ApexPages.currentPage().getParameters() that were provided in the initial invocation.
• This is a most curious defect because ApexPages.currentPage().getParameters() does nothing more than retrieve the POST/GET variables from the Request however this is NOT the case with Apex.

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