Integration

Salesforce: Yet Another JSON to Apex Converter

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A screenshot of the JSON to Apex Converter tool

I’ve been doing a lot of Salesforce integration as part of my most recent role. And where there’s integration, there’s JSON. The vast bulk of this work is integration using Apex, and so I began brushing up on what’s changed since I last got in the weeds many years ago. How much has changed? Surprisingly, not much! Depending on your situation, there are broadly 3 options when it comes to handling JSON in Apex: The options are in order of difficulty. Additionally, options 1 and 3 make for code that is much easier to work with because the Apex Types you define are strongly typed. But option 1 isn’t always possible e.g. if the JSON you’re working with uses reserved keywords, or if you want to process part of the JSON before sticking it in an Apex structure. However, this blog post is not about the various approaches and their …

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If This Then Salesforce

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I’ve been enjoying IFTTT for a while now and if you haven’t experimented with it yet then I’m not sure we’ll ever be friends. Essentially it’s a very easy tool that lets you set triggers on a source API e.g. Foursquare and have some information from that API be posted to a target API e.g. Jawbone Up. IFTTT calls these recipes and I’d like to demonstrate some particularly delicious combinations that can be used with Chatter. Salesforce Org Alerts and Known Issue posted to Chatter Salesforce makes Instance Alerts e.g. “Perfomance degradation on EU0.” available through an RSS feed so all you need to do is create a recipe (or copy mine) that monitors the appropriate RSS url for changes and posts to a particular Chatter group. You can do a similar thing with Salesforce Known Issues. Tweets posted to Chatter Quite often there are interesting tweets that I want to …

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Announcing the Salesforce Handbook

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Recently, Jeff Douglas and I saw the potential for a beginner’s book – aimed at business owners, analysts and developers, that comprehensively documents Salesforce and Force.com. There is a tonne of documentation out there and we thought “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a handbook that lightly summarised the most important areas of the platforms as well as offering some best practise advice”. We mulled it over for a time, and today we’d like to announce that we’re currently writing: The Salesforce Handbook A newcomer’s guide to building applications on Salesforce.com and the Force.com Platform. Hand-in-hand with the book we’ll be publishing content from the book on a WordPress site. Here you can expect to find excerpts from the book, but also content that supplements the book e.g. areas that’ll serve as best-practice hubs with links to official documentation, blog posts that rock the party, and even superb discussion forum …

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Salesforce API Integration Using SOAP-based Web Services

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Too Much Documentation (TMD) - The leading cause of baldness amongst men.

There are several tomes & tools to help you integrate with the platform; this article will concentrate on WSDL defined web services. Some help texts are specific to certain languages, others favour certain approaches but I’ve found there’s no short-and-sweet guide. As someone who’s nearly drowned in the documentation (including forums, tweets and blogs) I thought I’d try to save – at least some of you – the white-squall that is ‘Learning the basics of SFDC WSDL-based integration’.

I’ll be the first to admit that summarising such a broad topic can be difficult, so if I do miss anything out, y’all out there in the community just let me know.

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