I am very new to DocuSign and trying to create a proof-of-concept for integrating DocuSign with our own Managed Package for Salesforce. I understand how I can create an envelope, how to create a document based on a template, how to fill it with the data of my Salesforce record and also how to send it.
My issue though is that the data which needs to be filled into the DocuSign document is not entirely saved within the specified record. Some data such as certain KPIs are loaded from AWS but belong to the record you're looking at. To me it seems that when creating an envelope, you need to specify the record-id of the record you're trying to pull data from.
Is it possible to extend that by not specifying a record-id but rather an Apex Object or List for example?
I need a fairly trivial thing: every time a user changes a salesoforce custom object field, I need to notify the external service about the change.
Either push the notification or somehow log the object change event somewhere in salesforce. (and make the external service regularly check those latest events for any new activity)
Is either of those options possible?
The only info I could find on this issue is this somewhat relevant SO thread, but it's 3 years old and doesn't answer anything.
This can be done by creating a PushTopic and subscribing to it via Streaming API.
I have a specific field that I am trying to find. The salesforce instance I am in has hundreds of tables/objects so I can't look through them manually.
I also only have read only access, so I can't run an APEX script or create objects. I am using an API to access the database, and store the data outside of salesforce.
What I need is to find the object/table that this field is stored in so I can write an SOQL query to get the field's values. Any ideas?
Easiest way is with Workbench.
In the single page webapp I've recently built I'm getting data for my models using Restangular module. I'd like to add real-time updates to the app so whenever any model has been changed or added on the server I can update my model list.
I've seen this working very well in webapps like Trello where you can see the updates without refreshing the web page. I'm sure Trello webclient uses REST API.
What is a proper way to architect both server and client to archive this?
First of all, your question is too general and can have a lot of solutions that depend
on your needs and conditions.
I'll give you a brief overview for a single case when you want to leave REST APIs
and add some realtime with web sockets.
Get all data from the REST -- Sokets for notifications only.
Pros: Easy to implement both server side and client side. You only need to emit events on the server with
info about modified resource (like resource name and ID), and catch these events on the client side and fetch
data with REST APIs.
Cons: One more request to the server on every notification. That can increase traffic dramaticaly when you have a lot of active clients for a single resource (they will generate a lot of reverse requests to the server).
Get initial load from the REST -- Sockets for notifications with data payload.
Pros: All info comes with the notification and will not cause new requests to the server, so we have less traffic.
Cons: Harder to implement both server side and client side. You will need to add data to all the events on the server. You will need to fetch data from all the events on the client side.
Updated according to the comment
As for handling different types of models (just a way to go).
Client side.
Keep a factory for each model.
Keep in mind that you need realtime updates only for displayed data (in most cases), so you can easily
use memory caching (so you can find any entity by its ID).
Add listener for every type of changes (Created, Updated, Deleted).
In any listener you should call some initObject function, that will find entity in the cache by ID and extend it, if there is no entity with such ID, just create a new one and add it to cache.
Any Delete just removes an entity from the cache.
Any time you need this resource, you should return the link to cache object in order to keep two way databinding (that is why I use extend and not =). Of course, you need to handle the cases like: "User is editing the resource while notification about deleting comes".
Server side.
It is easier to send all the model then just modified fields (in both cases you must send the ID of resource).
For any Create, Update, Delete event push event to all engaged users.
Event name should contain action name (like New, Update, Delete) and the name of resource (like User, Task etc.). So, you will have NewTask, UpdateTask events.
Event payload should contain the model or just modified fields with the ID.
Collection changes can be handled in two ways: with add/update/remove items in collection or changing all the collection as a whole.
All modifications like PUT, POST, DELETE are made with REST of course.
I've made a super simple pseudo gist for the case 1). https://gist.github.com/gpstmp/9868760 but it can be updated for case 2) like so https://gist.github.com/gpstmp/9900454
Hope this helps.
I'm trying to write an app on the SalesForce platform that can pull a list of contacts from a report and send them to a web service (say to send them an email or SMS)
The only way I can seem to find to do this is to add the report results to a newly created campaign, and then access that campaign. This seems like the long way around.
Every post I read online says you can't access the reports through Apex, however most or all of these posts were written before Version 20 of the API was released last month, which introduced a new report object. I can now programmatically access info about a report (Such as the date last run etc) but I still can't seem to find a way to access the result data contained in that report.
Does anyone know if there's a way to do that?
After much research into it, I've discovered the only way to do this at the moment is indeed to scrape the CSV document. I would guess that Conga etc are using exactly this method.
We've been doing this for a while now, and it works. The only caveats are:
Salesforce username / password /
security token has to be shared to
the app connecting. If the password
changes (and by default it is changed
every 30 days or so) the token also
changes and must be re-entered.
You have to know the host of the account, which can be difficult to
get right. For instance while most european accounts would use emea.salesforce.com to access CSV, our account uses na7 (North America 7) even though we're located in
ireland. I'm currently sending the page host to the app and parsing it
to calculate the correct subdomain to use, but I think there has to be a
better way to do this.
Salesforce really needs to sort this out by supplying an API call which allows custom report results to be exported on the fly and allowing us to use OAuth to connect to it. But of course, this is unlikely to happen.
In the SalesforceSpring 11 update, it seems you can obtain more informations about the Reports:
As stated in the API for Report and ReportType, you can access via Apex the fields used in the query by the Report, reading the field "columns", as well as the field used to represent the filters called "filter".
Iterating through this objects, should allow you to build a String representing the same query of the Report. After building that string you can make a dynamic query with a Database.query(..) call.
It seems to be a little messy, but should work.. (NOT TESTED YET!)
As header states, this works only with Custom Reports!
Just to clarify for fellow rookies who will find this, when the question was asked you could access your report data programatically, but you had to use some hacky, error prone methods.
This is all fixed, you can now access your reports via the API as of Winter '14.
Documentation here - http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/api_analytics/index.htm
Go to town on those custom dashboards etc. Cross posted from the Salesforce Stack Exchange - https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/337/can-report-data-be-accessed-programatically/
But Conga (appextremes) do this in their QuickMerge product, where the user specifies the report Id, and the apex script on the page runs the report to extract the results for a mail merge operation.
the v20.0 API added metadata about the reports, but no way to actually run the report and obtain the results. If this is a standard report, or a report you've defined, you can work out the equivalent SOQL query for your report and run that, but if its an end user defined report, there's no way to do this.