re white paper

8/14/2019 Re White Paper

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Copyright1997-2010OPRO

JapanCo.,Ltd.A

llrightsreserved.

OPROARTS Apps Report Engine

OPRO Japan Co., Ltd.

Integrating Force.com sites with OPROARTS Apps Report Engine

http://www.opro.net/oproarts/en
http://www.opro.net/oproarts/enhttp://www.opro.net/oproarts/en


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Copyright 1997-2010 OPRO Japan Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.

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IntroductionThis whitepaper discusses how users could use OPROARTS Apps Report Engine Force.

com application along with Force.com sites to develop scalable web applications easily.

BackgroundOPROARTS Apps Report Engine

OPROARTS Apps Report Engine (RE) is a Force.com application introduced by OPRO

Japan Co., Ltd. This application was developed with the objective of overcoming the Force.

com limitations in developing multi paged PDF documents and reports.

RE provides the ease of API based PDF document generation on Force.com platform.

Force.com application developers will be able to use this application to develop multi

paged PDF documents with great consistency and accuracy.

It has improved the PDF rendering on Force.com in a number of methods. It has introduceda band based reporting model where users could specify contents for the page header, footer

and body. This allows the users to have a structure to the documents. They could specify

this structure on a visualforce page template.

RE has also improved the page numbering model and has made significant improvements

on page numbering during mail merge. Default Force.com page numbering methodology

does not reset the page numbers when the same PDF document is attached to multiple

recipients or opportunities. But RE allows re-setting of page numbers when merging tomultiple recipients & multiple opportunities. This feature ensures that each recipient will

receive his/her copy of correctly-page-numbered PDF document.


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Force.com Sites

Force.com sites platform is a proprietary technology of Salesforce.com. Sites technology

is expected to revolutionize the web development industry by offering users a web

development platform different from traditional web hosting model. Users will be able to

focus on do it yourself web development on their PaaS platform without seeking expertweb hosting. This platform is primarily based on Visualforce technology. Within this new

cloud based web development paradigm, users could develop applications rapidly without

building their web sites from the scratch.

Integration Benefits

Force.com site paradigm itself is built with the objective of minimizing the web site

development time. It allows the users and developers to take to Force.com technology

beyond CRM. Also it allows the users to integrate their web applications with their CRM

accounts with ease.

RE also follows the same principle. Its designed with the objective of reducing the

development time and cost of reports on Force.com. Users could focus more on the contents

of their reports without worrying about the structure of the reports.

Furthermore, the RE is developed to reduce the complexity of generated reports by

introducing template based report development. This allows the users to separate structure

from content. If you have to alter the report format, you can alter the report template without

changing the application.

In addition users could implement multiple features such as document delivery by email

or fax. It also allows users to attach and download the document with ease. Rather than

spending development time on implementing the document delivery, it could be done using

the report engine.

Solution

This solution will show how we can integrate Force.com sites with RE to develop a web

application easily.

Users will start developing an integrated application by installing RE on their Force.com

account. Then, they can extend the RE functionality in to their application by making simple

API calls to the RE application. They could integrate the RE in to the application domainof the web site being developed.

Extended benefits of this solution include easy integration in to third party service provider

apps. For instance users could forward the generated PDF output to email to eax service.


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Sample Application of integrating RE with Salesforce Sites.

In this sample application we have integrated RE with the Force.com sites to develop a web

application where participant can download the seminar ticket after completing registration

process.

Sample application can be accessed from the following link.

http://reportengine-developer-edition.ap1.force.com/

Sample Application Steps

The potential customer (Lead) fills the seminar registration form and clicks on the preferred

delivery method; download, mail or fax.

This action triggers a Lead creation in your Salesforce organization and then calls RE to do

the creation and delivering of the seminar ticket in PDF format.

How to develop the integrated application:

1. Sign up for a free Salesforce.com Developer edition account.

http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/events/regular/registration.php

2. Install OPROARTS Apps Report Engine from Appexchange.

http://sites.force.com/appexchange/apex/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000001tJBS

EA2

Youll be able to use this trial-version for 30-days.

3. Install following unmanaged package which includes sample source files for the

integration.

https://login.salesforce.com/?startURL=%2Fpackaging%2FinstallPackage.

apexp%3Fp0%3D04t900000000bdn

Note: If RE is not installed already in your production account, an error will be

displayed. Please refer RE documentation for more details.

4. Create new Force.com web site.

Please refer

http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/An_Introduction_to_Force.com_Sites,

for an in-depth tutorial on how to create your sites page.


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5. Set active home page and enable access to all the Visualforce pages of the RE and

RE_Sites_Source packages as shown in the following screen shot. Press Public

Access Settings button and scroll down to Standard Object Permissions. Set read/

Write permissions for Lead and Contacts standard objects.

6. Customize the code as described in code walkthrough section in order to integrate thefront-end, data and RE.


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Code Walkthrough Application home page developed using Force.com Sites

(RE_Sites_Sample).

Button actions of the Visualforce page invoke the relevant methods in page controller class

(SiteController class) and create and pass relevant parameters to the RE. Please refer RE

documentation for more information about parameter settings.

Following sample code shows how to set parameters for sending emails. You have to

customize templateUrl and the returnUrl according to the web Address of the newly

created Force.com site.

Eg.

Change http://reportengine-developer-edition.ap1.force.com/apex/BusinessDoc tohttp://******/apex/BusinessDoc.

****** will be default web address of the newly created Force.com site.

Common parameters define the output template. Action parameters set the other parameters

for mail such as To addresses and Cc addresses for emailing.


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Code sample for controller class of the home page (SiteController).


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Code sample for controller class of the output template (RE_OutputController class).


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Code sample for output visualforce template (BusinessDoc).

Code sample for brochure (RE_brochure).


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Note: This brochure will be dynamically generated as a PDF and attached to the email sent

to the user using the application.

A screenshot of the output PDF

User can also use an email template to embed rich contents with merged information in the

mail body(E.g including an image to the email body). This sample scenario demonstrates

the use of email templates.

However, to keep things simple, you can set plain text messages as email body using

emailBody parameter, without using email templates.


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Sample Visualforce code of the email template (RE_Email_Quote).

Email Confirmation page

7. Test your application.

Now you can try out the integrated application and customize further to suit your

use-case.


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TEL: +81 3-5765-6510

FAX: +81 3-5765-6560

Web: http://www.opro.net/oproarts/en

Email: [email protected]

OPRO Japan Co., Ltd.6F, Shibashin-Mita Bldg., 3-43-15,

Shiba, Minato-Ku, Tokyo, 105-0014,

Japan.

Benefits

Integration of RE in to Force.com sites will expand the benefits of Sites platform. It will

instantly enable developers to implement document generation and delivery features at

minimal cost and time.

Reduced web development cost and time Easy integration More precise output generation to end users Easy customization of templates

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