Force.com Sites, Visualforce & Your Mobile Device - December 15, 2008 at 5:57 pm

Note – Screen shots for Blackberry and iPhone below.

Dreamforce ’08 has come and gone. We had a couple of nice mentions — Lasso2Go of course but we also had the DFMobile application. Hit http://dfmobile.force.com from your mobile device if you’d like to see it. It works on a Blackberry, a WAP/ simple XHTML compatible device or an iPhone.

The use case: you’re a Dreamforce 08 attendee and you want to find out about the event from your phone. And if you’ve already registered on the Dreamforce portal, you can access the schedule you built there on your mobile device. You can search partners and sessions, find out more information about the Foo Fighters and local watering holes, and a whole lot more.*

The basic system is pretty straightforward. Some details:

The back end is the existing SFDC event registration system based on customer portal.
The DFMobile piece starts at a page that inspects the client and redirects to either the WAP / simple XHTML page or to the iPhone page based on the HTTP_ACCEPT environmental variable.
Both resulting pages use the same Apex controller and are based on Force.com Sites. Sites lets users see public information — partners, sessions, local info — without authenticating.
Users have the ability to search partners and sessions based on some simple criterial.
Users also have the ability to login. Once logged in, the user can see the schedule they originally created on the full web client.

There were a few other features that didn’t quite make it to production. For example, we created a way to highlight the particular room a session was in on the iPhone client. And to be clear, this is used a single image that the iPhone highlighted based on coordinates in the object. The only reason it didn’t make it to production was the timing of go-live.

For the iPhone developers out there, this is using the CiUI library from CNET. Over all, CiUI was pretty serviceable. The only thing that came up occassionally was an odd timing issue related to how fast CiUI could respond to user input. Sometimes, during testing, the javascript that replaces the body of a page would get out of synch with the results coming back from SFDC. The page would then display without the decorative wrapper containing the header, footer and CSS. Note: this apears to have only been an issue in artificial rapid fite tesing, not in production, and wasn’t an issue related to Force.com response times.

The biggest lesson learned? Getting the permissions aligned between the custom object, customer portal and Force.com sites takes a minute to get used to. If something isn’t checked, your application will appear unresponsive. If your app appears unresponsive, chances are good that it’s related to permissions.

A pretty exciting project all in all.

Blackberry Screenshots

Blackberry Main Screen (WAP/Simple XHTML)