Salesforce & LinkedIn Developer API: 401 – Unauthorized

I’m not going to get into the boilerplate code you’ll need in order to get OAuth up and running as it’s pretty straight forward, but I did run into a peculiar issue which took me some time to narrow down. To reproduce these steps you’ll need to: Correctly setup OAuth between the Force.com Platform and LinkedIn Authorise access to your LinkedIn account Attempt to fetch a resource using an API endpoint such as: http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~/network/updates?scope=self When attempting to make the call out in step 3 you’ll get a “401 – Unauthorized” error. So to be clear OAuth is working perfectly but a call like this one will still result in the error. After some troubleshooting I noticed that some API endpoints didn’t result in the error e.g. http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/id=abcdefg/network/updates?scope=self. At this point I realised the issue was probably the tilde (‘~’) character in the URI. Grasping at straws I manually replaced the tilde with …

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Salesforce API Integration Using SOAP-based Web Services


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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