Funcoder Technology Blog

Today I wanted to create an app that would allow me to add my activity so that I can analyse my time at a future date. I started my trusty IDE to start mocking up the idea when I had to step back for a moment and think there must be a simpler way to do this.

I use Salesforce for managing my projects and I usually post chatter messages to myself and others. What if I could post a custom # message that would be intercepted and posted to a custom object.

No problem… I created a custom object called Activity:

Then all you need to do is go to Customize > Chatter > Triggers and add a new trigger on the Feed Item.It’s then a matter of looking for a #activity tag in the feed item body, pulling the entry out and inserting it into my Activity custom object.

   1:  trigger ActivityPost on FeedItem (after insert) {

   2:      for (FeedItem f : trigger.new)

   3:      {

   4:          if (f.Body.startsWith('#activity')) {

   5:              funcoder__Activity__c a = new 
                                 funcoder__Activity__c (

   6:                  Name = f.Body.replace('#activity','')

   7:              );

   8:                      

   9:              insert a;

  10:          }

  11:      }

  12:  }

Now just go and enter a chatter message, for example #activity Developed an activity application in Salesforce.