From my app, I want to use SalesForce APIs to get datas about contacts (first/last name, mobile phone, email).
1/ is it free $ to use SalesForce APIs ?
2/ Where can I have access to the information about this specific API request ?
Many Thanks
"It depends"
You're paying for user license(s) already, in that sense the API requests are free. Accessing the Developer Edition / trailhead playground app is truly free. Then there are things like Essential Edition, Platform Edtion or whatever's the name - there's no API access in them out of the box. API is available in Enterprise, Unlimited etc. You need to check the edition you're planning to connect to.
And then... well, there are rolling 24h limits of API requests. Very forgiving in sandboxes, bit more strict in production (where they increase with every user license you buy or you can purhase extra "bandwidth")
It also depends how will you make these requests. Will you have 1 dedicated integration user or will every user of your web app log in to SF via your app and then you're piggybacking on them in a way (which is useful if your org has complex sharing rules for example and you need to be sure user sees in your app only the data they're allowed to see in core Salesforce).
Which brings us to how to connect. You have SOAP API and REST API. Depending on your programming language there are ready-made connectors for .NET, PHP, Python, Java... Regardless which you choose there will be at least 2 http calls needed. 1 to log in and get session id back, 1 to run actual query.
With SOAP API you pass username & password in login call, get XML message back with session id and endpoint (base url to use from now on). And then you'd query. SELECT FirstName, LastName, MobilePhone, Email FROM Contact or whatever you need.
With REST API there are more options, there's similar username-password flow but there are also more secure ways where your app never sees the user's password, user enters it on SF login screen and is redirected back to you. This is very good if you're making a web app or mobile app. You'd need to read up about all OAuth2 flows available.
Again - there's a chance you can say "don't care" and just use say https://pypi.org/project/simple-salesforce/
Related
I have a React Application which is going to leverage Google My Business API to get review data of a business.
I was expecting to use the API-KEY via REST approach however Authorization Scope mentions that OAuth 2.0 is required to use this API.
After I read more about OAuth's purpose, it seemed like it is more for application's which require access to a user's data and therefore would required a consent screen verified by google.
For my use-case however, all I need is access to all google reviews for a business and nothing related to the visiting users.
Can someone recommend an approach for this? (I don't want a pop-up/consent request when a user visits as I don't need user data.)
After much research, it seems that if you want to retrieve ALL REVIEWS for your business you will have to use Google's My Business API. This API requires you to use OAUTH2 for authentication which means (although you will not be querying a visiting user's data) visiting users will be required to provide consent pop up screen.
This leaves you with the places API as the next best option:
REST GET endpoint maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/details/json?placeid={your place ID}&fields=review&key={YOUR API KEY}
Although this only returns google's top 5 "most helpful" reviews, its pretty much the only way to get reviews without a consent screen unless you want to scrape data which is not ideal for many reasons...
I am working on a integration with Salesforce using REST APIs and, as part of the project, I need to send updates to Salesforce and these updates are not user triggered, they are system triggered.
Because of that, what I expect to see on Salesforce Field History is not a user name but the name of our Connected App (the app that made the update).
What I see today is the user name because the way the integration was made initially using OAuth Authorization Code flow.
To change that part of the project, I followed the link (OAuth 2.0 JWT Bearer Flow for Server-to-Server Integration): https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=sf.remoteaccess_oauth_flows.htm&type=5
Making that, I was expeting to generate a token for a System, not for a User, but that's not what happened: when I used the token generate from the JWT Bearer Flow and ran the update, the Field History still shows the user name.
What could I do then?
Which are the options in Salesforce to achieve the behavior I'm expecting?
The most important, in my opinion, is to have a Token for our system, not for a user.
Thanks!
Everybody is an user in Salesforce. Even if you access unauthenticated pages (some contact us form? case or lead capture) - it gets tracked under special Guest User.
It sounds stupid but gives you unified interface to control permissions (Profiles/Permission sets). You want guests to access only FAQ articles and make cases? Sure thing, do it in profile, don't get paranoid about people trying to guess right URLs. You think an app was hacked? You can terminate the session just like any other "user". Want to allow login only in certain hours and from certain IP? Sure.
An app connecting with JWT will still need username (main difference being it's "just" certificate for signing the request instead of password).
Your best bet is to create dedicated "Mr System", "SystemX integration" account. It sounds like waste of license but in the long run saves you questions "why did you edit my account at 1 am" and you could even use it as backup account if you use SSO and it ever fails...
I am building a form in react and I wanted to send it to my email when the user clicked the submit button.
I was looking at Microsoft Graph API for sending the email (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/user-sendmail?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=javascript), but checking it, seems that it needs a temporary token, so I can't use it as I would need to be changing the token every hour or so.
So, I'm basicaly trying to find an API like the Gmail but for office 365 accounts (https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/guides/sending), as we can create a gcp project and use the keys that it generates for us, instead of using a token like the MS Graph API
Generaly I would use a route in my API, but this site is static, so I do not have any API (neither serverlets, cloud functions or other stuff like it).
Is there any away to send an email through a Microsoft API from my web client in react, using only a token specific to the domain? Or is there a better away to acomplish this same result?
I highly recommend using https://formsubmit.co/. It's free and I personally use it in many projects. Works flawlessly with many features like email templating, captcha, reply_to, etc.
No backend knowledge is required. Can set it up in like 1 minute.
One option would be to authenticate on behalf of the user.
You can also have a small proxy API, dedicated for the purpose of allowing the users to send an email.
I am new to Salesforce, but am an experienced developer. I am provided a link to a Salesforce report, which mostly has the right filters (query). I would like to use an REST API to pull that information as CSV or JSON so that I can do further processing on it.
Here are my questions:
Do I need special permissions to make API calls? What are they?
Do I need to create an "app" with client-key & secret? Does my admin need to grant me permission for this too?
There are a lot of REST APIs from Salesforce, which one do I need to get the info from the report? Analytics?
How do I authenticate in code?
You'd have to work with the System Administrator on the security pieces. Anybody who knows how the company works, can all users see everything, is there Single Sign-On in place, how likely is the report to change...
You will need an user account to pull the data. You need to decide if it'll be some "system account" (you know username and password and have them stored in your app) or can it run for any user in this org. It might not matter much but reports are "fun". If there will be data visibility issues 6 months from now, you'll be asked to make sure the report shows only French data to French users etc... you can make it in report filters or have multiple reports - or you can just use current users access and then it's the sysadmin that has to set the sharing rules right. (would you ever think about packaging what you did and reusing in another SF instance? Making a mobile app out of it? Things like that, they may sound stupid now but will help you decide on best path)
The user (whether it'll be system account or human) needs Profile permissions like "API Enabled" + whatever else you'd need normally ("Run Reports" etc). If you're leaning towards doing it with system user - you might want to look at Password Policies and maybe set password to Never Expires. Now this is bit dangerous so there would be other things you might want to read up about: "API only user" (can't login to website), maybe even locking down the account so it can login only from certain IP ranges or at certain times when the job's supposed to be scheduled...
Connected App and OAUth2 stuff - it's a good idea to create one, yes. Technically you don't have to, you could use SOAP API to call login, get session id... But it's bit weak, OAuth2 would give you more control over security. If you have sandboxes - there's little-known trick. You can make connected app in production (or even totally unrelated Developer Edition) and use client id & secret from it to login to sandboxes. If you create app in sandbox and you refresh it - keys stop working.
(back to security piece - in connected app you can let any user allow/deny access or sysadmin would allow only say these 3 users to connect, "pre-authorize". Could be handy)
Login - there are few REST API ways to login. Depends on your decision. if you have 1 dedicated user you'll probably go with "web server flow". I've added example https://stackoverflow.com/a/56034159/313628 if you don't have a ready SF connection library in your programming language.
If you'll let users login with their own credentials there will be typical OAuth "dance" of going to the target page (Google login, LinkedIn, Twitter...) and back to your app on success. This even works if client has Single Sign-On enabled. Or you could let people type in their username and pass into your app but that's not a great solution.
Pull the actual report already
Once you have session id. Official way would be to use Reporting API, for example https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_analytics.meta/api_analytics/sforce_analytics_rest_api_get_reportdata.htm
A quick & dirty and officially not supported thing is to mimic what happens when user clicks the report export in UI. Craft a GET request with right cookie and you're golden. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/57745683/313628. No idea if this will work if you went with dedicated account and "API access only" permission.
I am faced with a rather strange request and there isn't much material online tackling that.
I am building a web app on GAE ... front end, back end, datastore, blob store, user accounts, the whole nine yards ...
Part of the requirements is to have a user communication system, (users sending messages to each other, just like Facebook) as user emails are not to be shared among other users, and the web app shall only send emails to the user sign up email strictly for security and administration purposes, and wont flood their inbox with notifications like some websites do.
I have narrowed narrowed it down to 4 options
Option 1:
Reinvent the wheel - Build this whole system form scratch on the Datastore and Blob store. However, not only is it expensive, but also I am not gonna go through all of that (just saying honestly)
Option 2:
Build a bouncing system ... User A sends message to app ... app bounces email to User B. Not very Elegant, impossible to create threads and conversations, eats up app Mail Quota used for Marketing and what not.
Option 3:
Host My own Email server onsite. Patch an API servlet and run the whole show through API. Very valid, except that the client doesn't want anything on site, and I wont be around to maintain it for him.
Option 4:(Best option if someone helps out)
Implement option 3 on a 3rd party email provider. Which brings us to the question, is there any respectable email provider that allows account sign up through API ?? I need to create a shadow email account on a 3rd party server(that the user will never know it exists) every time someone makes an account on my app. Then store all emails and their generated passwords in the Datastore, and when user logs in my web app, web app logs in 3rd party server, retrieves messages and serves it. When he wants to send a message, web app gets the message, sends an email using API as well. If someone knows how to do that on Gmail, I would be eternally grateful (but I highly doubt google allows that)
Note
I can implement the whole setup on xmpp/Jabber servers as well but these free servers keep changing all the time and they change their configurations ... bottom line they are not very reliable.
Thanks a lot guys !! I really appreciate any feed back and if you have any other suggestions please don't hesitate !! This is by no means a solid plan yet.