Apex in AppEx

At NPower, we’ve been making increasing use of Apex code to do some things we could not do before:

• enforcing business rules across objects
• updating records automatically across objects
• rolling up data like membership renewal date and contact donation totals 
• separating the web interface of s-controls from the code that actually modifies data

All great stuff!  And we love creating and testing Apex code (and s-controls) in Eclipse.  The latest release is really slick (more on that in another post).  But what we really wanted when this was all done was to give a consultant or a client a link where they could install this code into their own production instance of Salesforce.

Until this week, I thought the only way to install Apex code was to create a sandbox or developer account that exactly mirrors the account you want to install into, create and test all the code, and then deploy.  But I found out we can now package all this up into an AppExchange download.

I tried this out yesterday with a large package of apex, s-controls, custom fields, reports, and so on. The Apex code installed, tested, and deployed directly from the package link.

This will be a big timesaver for us — and in the long run, I hope it will make it possible for us to create powerful tools that clients can install with very little help from us.

Now all we need is the ability to package page layouts on standard objects.