Best Practices for Developers

When developing an application to run on top of the Pulsar Platform, developers have the freedom to use the wealth of web technology available in the mobile app environment. Pulsar has been successfully used with several popular web frameworks, allowing developers to use some of the same code and techniques they have used in more traditional web development. However, there are a few technologies and methodologies that can be used to improve the developer experience while building a Pulsar-based app.

General Recommendations

1. Start working with the simple examples on GitHub
2. Use Promises for continuations
3. Keep things modular -- build one library of API calls in the resources
4. Use global resources as much as possible. This means sharing common functions in common javascript files.
5. In code, use 18 character Ids
6. Date format should be a valid Salesforce date format
7. When building custom HTML pages, be mindful that using a "Submit" button will generally reload the page by default. This may trigger some of your initialization and setup methods to fire an additional time and prevent some asynchronous calls from completing. 
8. When working with API responses and Salesforce data, always check types and handle errors.
9. When working with data expected to contain JSON, be sure to check whether that JSON has already been parsed. Remember that the data you receive has traversed many layers before your code receives it.

Testing/Test Data

We encourage the use of a Salesforce Sandbox to test your code in the Pulsar environment. 

Debugging your HTML/Javascript

One of the first obstacles most developers run into is the difficulty of debugging their code in-place while it is running within the Pulsar app.

Beginning with Pulsar 3.8 for Android and Windows, you can set up a local development server running on your development machine to rapidly iterate on your code.

Viewing Pulsar Logs

You can add extra email addresses to receive logs from users by adding to the pulsar.logs.email.cc Pulsar Setting

On the Windows platform, you can directly view Pulsar logs at the following directory (e.g., from Windows Explorer):

• %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\AppData\Local\Packages\E3D1A000.PulsarforSalesforce_ta6n8xy84gcpg\LocalState\Library\Application Support\
• Note that the AppData directory may itself be hidden from Windows Explorer

Mobile Safari Tips

• In order to have smooth scrolling on iOS Safari, any time you would use CSS  overflow: scroll; -- 
  Make sure to include: -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch; This will ensure that your scrolling performance is smooth.

Hiding The Default Navigation Controls