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I was recently handed this test by a recruiter. I have a week to complete it in order to get an interview. I already know HTML/CSS, Javascript, and PHP/MySQL. I'm a little overwhelmed. If I need to spend a few days learning a new language, so be it, just not sure what the best direction would be. I know this is a bit of a general question, but I wasn't sure where else to post it. I'm not asking for someone to do it for me, as I need to do it and understand how, just asking for some direction.

  • One custom HTML (or ASP/JSP/PHP/Visualforce, etc) page that allows the user to select any Sunday of the year
  • Once they have selected a Sunday they should be shown a table with 7 columns representing the days of their selected week; each column should have an input to allow the user to enter the number of hours they worked that day
  • Upon Save/Submit of the html form, the hours should be captured as records of a custom object or objects in Salesforce.com"
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They're having you write a piece of actual 'business' code for them before you even had an interview with them? Your mileage may vary, but for me it would be major turn-off... – scrwtp May 27 '12 at 10:31
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@scrwtp that isn't a piece of actual business code - its a very lightweight example of something not entirely unreleated to real business code that one can use to assess (or at least contribute towards an assessemt of) the skill of a developer. I would worry if the recruiter or employer thought it was real... – Murph May 28 '12 at 7:53

closed as too localized by ChrisF♦ Jul 3 '12 at 11:20

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2 Answers

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The part about SalesForce.com seems a bit unfair as it is specialized and will require quite a bit of discovery. You should be sure it is a worthy gig and not just a recruiter harvesting names before undertaking such a time-consuming task even before the first interview.

For the API you can go to the Salesforce.com API for Custom objects and learn more. You will probably need to mock up custom "TimeTrackerWeek" object for the User related to the time for a week as a Master-Detail relationship (the object would be the detail). I don't know how they expect you to actually make the calls to the API, but your best bet would be to mock a proxy for SalesForce.com interface for unit testing, unless they give you a SalesForce.com account.

For the front-end web part it should be fairly standard although you might want to leverage JQuery for the calendar and possibly the form part as well (e.g. validation).

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unfair? not if its a job for a senior salesforce programmer :) – gbjbaanb May 26 '12 at 22:42
Good point, if that's the case it will be a very relevant exercise. – Turnkey May 27 '12 at 1:20
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Pragmatically saving the data is a relatively small part of the application and can easily be isolated from the rest of the required development work (and good practice suggests that you should be coding to an abstraction - in this case the logged hours "respository" would be something you define that becomes a wrapper over calls to storage). Your skills suggest that this part should be almost trivial.

So then the issue becomes one of the intent of the test - is it to test your web development skills or your knowledge of the Salesforce API? At this point you have to decide what your time is worth against the potential value of the code in the interview and how keen you are to get the job.

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