String Keys for Apex Maps Are Case-sensitive

I discovered today that String keys for Apex Maps are case-sensitive. Apparently the Strings "johndoe" and "JohnDoe" are not equal when being compared to see if the Map contains a key.

Comparing Salesforce Record ID's in Visualforce

Strangely enough, the Visualforce comparison operator does not work when comparing a 15-digit record ID with an 18-digit one. The workaround I concocted is to use a very specific Boolean property in my controller extension to perform the comparison instead, since I really wanted to avoid using any kind of custom ID conversion code that may become invalid in future releases.

public Boolean isCitizenshipCountryUnitedStates {
   get {
       return stdCtrler.getRecord().get('Citizenship_Country__c') == unitedStatesCountryId;
   }
}

The situation I have is that I want to compare the Country of Citizenship specified on an application record (for custom object Application) to see whether the applicant is a U.S. citizen. Country of Citizenship is a Lookup(Country) field, with Country also being a custom object.

Without hardcoding the Id for the United States country, I defined a unitedStatesCountryId property as follows:

 public Id unitedStatesCountryId {
    get {
        if (unitedStatesCountryId == null) {
            List matchingCountries =
                    [SELECT Id FROM Country__c
                     WHERE Name = 'United States'];
        
            if (matchingCountries.size() > 0) {
                unitedStatesCountryId = matchingCountries.get(0).Id;
            }
        }
    
        return unitedStatesCountryId;
    }

    set;
}

When I evaluate the expression {!Application__c.Citizenship_Country__c = unitedStatesCountryId} in my Visualforce page, the expression always returns false. When digging a little deeper, I found that Application__c.Citizenship_Country__c was returning 'a0DT0000006NIDM' while unitedStatesCountryId was returning 'a0DT0000006NIDMMA4'! Visualforce appeared to be comparing the two values as Strings and not as Ids.

Finding no Visualforce-native solution, I had to go the route of creating the isCitizenshipCountryUnitedStates property in my controller extension. Needless to say, this quirk in Salesforce does not make me happy.

Deleting Characters (a.k.a. Backspacing) through SSH in PuTTY

I've been annoyed consistently by a quirk with SSH, PuTTY, Unix and sudo where pressing the backspace character prints a ^? on the terminal instead of deleting the previous character. Then, to my amazement today, I stumbled upon a way to delete characters through SSH in PuTTY without messing with any terminal configurations!

To delete characters, all one has to do is press either...

• Shift+Backspace; or
• Right Arrow

I assume this works with Terminal in Mac OS X or Linux as well, but I have not yet tried. Gone are the days now when I have to retype a 80+ character command just because of a single, silly typo...