Preview as Admin Feature for Salesforce Sites

I just discovered (1 year too late) the Preview as Admin feature for developing Salesforce Sites.  This has got to be one of the more useful things that I wish I had picked up earlier.

Basically, when developing a site and testing it as an anonymous user, error messages are sometimes hidden behind the annoying "Authorization Required" message.

Preview as Admin saves the day by delivering the anonymous user experience, enhanced with a useful description of the errors at the bottom of the page whenever errors appear.

Awesome, indeed.  I wonder what other features are out there that I don't know but should know...

Bug (?) with Rerendering an apex:pageBlockSection When apex:inputFile Exists Elsewhere on Page

I can understand throwing an error if we rerender part of a page that contains an apex:inputFile component, but I'm a bit confused about why rerendering part of a page that has no apex:inputFile component should generate the following error:

apex:inputFile can not be used in conjunction with an action component, apex:commandButton or apex:commandLink that specifies a rerender or oncomplete attribute.

I've created a demo for getting the error message, although you can't see the exact error message unless you deploy the page in your own sandbox. The source code can be downloaded here.

What I expected was that my partial page refresh of "Dependent Section" would work just fine. However, when I change the value in my controlling picklist, the page just fails, with the error mentioned above.

Is this a bug? I'm not sure what Salesforce would say, but it certainly is puzzling and extremely frustrating to me.

Conversion Error setting value 'value1 value2 value3' for '#{myMultiselectPicklistValue}'.

Salesforce is great. Apex is great. Visualforce is great.

Until you run into bizarre errors with no obvious explanation, such as the following error:

Conversion Error setting value 'value1 value2 value3' for '#{myMultiselectPicklistValue}'.

This error comes from trying to save the selections from an apex:selectCheckboxes component into a multi-select picklist field. You would think that it's as easy as simply specifying {!property} for the value attribute of the apex:selectCheckboxes component. But, no, it's not.

Multi-select picklist values are stored as String values, with each option delimited with a semicolon.  This is great to know, but what happens with apex:selectCheckboxes? apex:selectCheckboxes expects a List<String>! This discussion board post hints at the annoyance awaiting developers: "Checkboxes not saving".

Basically, to spell it out for myself and for others, here's what we have to do as developers working around this problem.

What we want to write is:


<apex:selectcheckboxes value="{!mPicklistValue}">

... and in the controller ...


public String mPicklistValue { get; set; }

Instead, what we have to write is:


<apex:selectcheckboxes value="{!mPicklistValues}">

... and in the overblown controller ...

private String mPicklistValue;
public List<String> getMPicklistValues() {
    List<String> values = null;
    // Convert mPicklistValue into List of 
    // String values

    if (mPicklistValue != null)
        values = mPicklistValue.split(';');

    return values;
}   // List<String> getMPicklistValues()
public void setMPicklistValues(
        List<String> values) {

    // Convert values into a semilcolon-delimited
    // String value

    if (values == null) {
        mPicklistValue = null;
    }
    else {
        mPicklistValue = '';
        
        for (String value : values) {
            mPicklistValue += value + ';';
        }
    }
}   // void setMPicklistValues(List<String>)

Note the plural name of the custom getter and setter methods. Cheers, indeed.