Thursday, June 30, 2016

Monitoring your Salesforce API usage

This seems to be a fairly common request on the Salesforce forums that developers frequent.

What is REQUEST_LIMIT_EXCEEDED: TotalRequests Limit exceeded. error about?
How can I found out what caused me to hit it?
How to determine what is making the API calls?
How can I get insight into an API call that took place on a certain date for one of our connected apps?

First, some context. This is the Total API Request Limits limit. It is a rolling limit for an organization over the last 24-hours. This means an API call made just now will count towards that limit until 24 hours from now. Don't expect the limit to reset back to zero at midnight.

The exact size of this limit depends on the Salesforce Edition and the number of per user licenses of a given type you have. It is possible to purchase additional API calls without needing more user licenses.

Basic monitoring

There are two locations where it is easy to check the current API usage.

Under Setup > Company Profile > Company Information there is an API Requests field. This will show you the current API call count the the maximum you can reach.

Then, within Reports > Administrative Reports there is API Usage Last 7 Days

This provides slightly finer detail, such and the username that held the session and the Client Id that was used to make the call. The Client Id can be useful as it can identify which external app was consuming the API calls.

Receiving a warning

You can configure an email alert to a user when the API requests exceed a percentage or you maximum requests. This is a RateLimitingNotification record that you create from Setup > Administration Setup > Monitoring > API Usage Notifications.

Monitoring via the API

The REST API has a Limits resource and a specific Organizations Limits resource that includes the "DailyApiRequests".

The SOAP APIs have a LimitInfoHeader that can be used to monitor API usage. This corresponds to the REST API Sforce-Limit-Info Limit Info Header.

Event Monitoring API

The Event Monitoring API can provide much finer details about API calls over a wider history. With this (paid feature) you can see exactly what API calls were made in a time period.

E.g. From the developer console query editor

select Id, EventType, LogDate, LogFileLength from EventLogFile where EventType = 'API' and LogDate = 2016-02-20T00:00:00.000Z

Look for the EventType of API and the LogDate for the UTC day of interest. Unfortunately there isn't a single comprehensive EventType that will allow you to monitor all events that contribute to the limit. There is also the Bulk API, Metadata API Operation, and REST API.

Consider voting for Event Monitoring for all calls that contribute to the 24 hour API request limit to get single event type to aggregate all API requests.

You can then pull down the single `LogFile` data, which is a base 64 encoded CSV with all the API calls for that day.

select Id, LogFile from EventLogFile where ID = '0AT700000005WDaGAM'

The FuseIT SFDC Explorer has an Event Log tab that uses the same API calls and will extract the file for you and export it to a CSV.

For the LogFile, look for the USER_ID, CLIENT_IP, and CLIENT_NAME to help identify which app is making the calls.

See also:

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Taming the size of a Salesforce Canvas

For an artist, facing a blank canvas can be a real challenge. For a Salesforce developer a Canvas app can be challenging for an entirely different reason - how to even define what size the Canvas is to start with?

In the ideal world you could just follow the docs and Automatically Resize the Canvas App to suit the content size. In practice this doesn't work so well for all scenarios.

I'm looking to embed an existing web application that was previously located in a Web Tab iframe into a Canvas Visualforce page using <apex:canvasApp />. My ideal goal is that the external web application blends in with Salesforce. There shouldn't be any jarring scrollbars on the iframe that make it look out of place.

The Web Tab approached worked well in that the width of the iframe didn't need to be defined and so it would get an <iframe width="100%">. Now the iframe can shrink and grow to follow along with any changes to the browser size. The nested app can correspondingly adjust its width to suit the available dimensions. The downside to this approach is that the iframes height needs to be specified. This is more problematic, and requires a fixed height that is sufficient to hold the majority of content. E.g. 3000px. Ech! Crazy vertical scroll bar!

Back the the Canvas iframe and the problem with dimensions. Firstly, a plain default Canvas app won't size past 2000px in height and 1000px in width. You need to explicitly set the maxHeight and maxWidth attributes to "infinite" (Documented in Docs but undocumented in other locations.). With the browser full width on a 1080 screen the default 1000px width limit is way too low. Sadly there is currently no corresponding minWidth/minHeight attributes.

Now we've pulled the limits off how big the iframe can get, how to correctly size it to both the browser window and the content within? As mentioned above, the auto resize should be just the thing here. Unfortunately it doesn't play so well with content that dynamically scales to the available space. I found it would either default to the minimum page width defined by the content, or worse still, shrink as the iframe content used Javascript to resize and then reacted to the auto resizing in an unending loop. If there was a way to define the minimum height and to let the iframe width stay at "100%" it would be infinitely more useful.

The autogrow() resizing script appears to come from canvas-all.js. It is basically a timer to periodically call resize. I haven't gone through the fine details, but I believe part of the code is for communicating with the parent iframe so that it can be resized accordingly.

How can I size a Canvas apps iframe in Visualforce to be the full window width with a height to fit the content?

At this stage I'm experimenting with either using a custom canvas-all.js implementation or manually calling Sfdc.canvas.client.resize(). I'll update this page when I get somewhere workable.

Another potential problem with the height is dynamic content, such a modal dialogs, that may not register as affecting the page height.

See also:

Friday, June 3, 2016

The importance of reading the Salesforce Release notes - a cautionary tale

By the time you read this the underlying problem is likely to be a non-issue with the transition to Summer '16 complete. It does highlight the importance of going through the release notes with a fine-tooth comb.

How carefully do you read the release notes for each of the big triannual releases? For Spring '16 the complete document weighed in at 486 pages. "Great!" you say, that's a lot of new features and fixes to play with.

Spoiler alert: I'll admit here that I read them, but didn't commit the entire document to memory. This caught me out as follows:

Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individual pods.

  • Client: For our FooBarWidget records, I need to be able to set if it has one of 4 possible values. Only those 4 values are applicable.
  • Me: That sounds like a good candidate for a picklist field. I'll add one with these values you provided and have it to you shortly for testing.
  • Client: Oh, and we need this in production ASAP.
  • Me: Got it, the usual.
  • Me to dev sandbox: Add a new picklist field to FooBarWidget please.
  • Spring '16 Dev Sandbox:
  • Me to dev sandbox: It's not really a global picklist. And when I looked further at those there is a big red BETA next to them. Let's just define the values here as a one off thing. That "Strictly enforce picklist values" option sounds good. Definitely don't want those rascally users putting inappropriate values in the picklist again. No siree!
  • <The sound of hammers, saws and typing. Maybe some random metal grinding to look good on camera. End result is a changeset for the new picklist field.>
  • Me to pre-production sandbox: Validate and then quick deploy this change set.
  • Spring '16 Pre-production sandbox: Done, and have a deployment fish for your troubles.
  • <High fives CS6 instance. Which was tricky with the whole cloud thing, but we made it work.>
  • Me to Client: Please test the functionality in pre-prod. When you are happy with it we can deploy it to production.
  • Client: It works. And you did it so quickly! You sir are the most meaningful and valued member of this team!
  • Me to Client: I do what I can.
  • Me to Production: Validate this change set.
  • Spring '16 Production: Woah, woah, woah, back the change set up.
    "Cannot have restricted picklists in this organization."
    No deployment fish for you!
  • Me mumbling to self: What the?
  • Me to Google: "Cannot have restric...
  • <Google reads mind>
  • Google: Error message: Cannot have restricted picklists in this organization
  • <Re-reads release notes>
  • Spring '16 Release Notes:
    If you have a Developer Edition org or sandbox org, no setup is required to use restricted picklists. You can package restricted picklists with an app only in Developer Edition or sandbox orgs.
    For all other editions, restricted picklists are available as a beta feature, which means they’re highly functional but have known limitations. Contact Salesforce to enable restricted picklists.
  • Me grumbling to self: It's enabled by default in all sandboxes and dev orgs, but won't work in production without begging to get on the pilot. AND THERE IS NO UI INDICATION THAT IT IS A BETA FEATURE!
    That's just brilliant!
  • Summer '16 Release Notes: Eliminate Picklist Clutter with Restricted Picklists (Generally Available)
  • Me to client: Soooooo, we can't deploy the change set as is to production. We need to do one of the following:
    1. Wait until Summer '16 releases for the feature to become GA. The trust website has it scheduled for one week from now.
    2. Remove the restriction from the picklist and look for other ways to prevent incorrect values in the short term. Make the field restricted again once Summer '16 deploys
    3. Raise a support case and ask our AE to get on the pilot for the one week until Summer '16 arrives.
  • Client: I'm not so much with the meaningfulness and valuing right now.
    Anyhow... That last one sounds like fun. Let's do that!
  • ...

Things degenerate a bit from there and are best not recorded in this medium. The point is that this one was a bit of a pain. Adding the new picklist field in the sandbox gave no indication that things were anything but fine and business as usual. There were no warnings that the features were still in pilot outside of the sandbox and dev orgs. It even deployed just fine into the pre-production sandbox. Then it exploded when trying to deploy to production.

Needless to say, I'm not a huge fan of implicitly activated pilot features in all sandbox and dev orgs without the corresponding BETA indication in the UI.

Admittedly it was all documented right there in the Spring '16 release notes. And the imminent release of Summer '16 will make it all a moot point.

Moral of the story - keep reading those release notes. And I salute you if you can remember everything you read in them.