How do you make Salesforce ping my application? - database

I have data in Salesforce and run another application that works with the same data. The current workflow is that when data is entered into the custom application, it sends the information to Salesforce via SOAP. I want to establish the reverse link; when a value is changed on the Salesforce side, I want Salesforce to ping my application with the changes. Does Salesforce have a feature to do this? Something equivalent to a trigger maybe?
My current solution is mindless iteration through all Salesforce records. This is slow, hits the API limit often, and keeps data stale too long.

You can do this using Streaming API
Introduction:
Use Streaming API to receive notifications for changes to Salesforce data.
Use to push relevant data in realtime, instead of having to refresh the screen to get new information. Protocols Use for Connection:
The Bayeux protocol and CometD both use long polling.
Bayeux is a protocol for transporting asynchronous messages, primarily over HTTP.
CometD is a scalable HTTP-based event routing bus that uses an AJAX push technology pattern known as Comet. It implements the Bayeux
protocol. The Salesforce servers use version 2.0 of CometD.
How it Works:
Create a PushTopic based on a SOQL query. This defines the channel. (PushTopic is a standard object).
Clients subscribe to the channel.
A record is created, updated, deleted, or undeleted (an event occurs). The changes to that record are evaluated.
If the record changes match the criteria of the PushTopic query, a notification is generated by the server and received by the subscribed
clients.
Please check this link : http://www.salesforce.com/developer/docs/api_streaming/

Related

How to subscribe to Salesforce connected app webhooks?

I want to implement a connected OAuth app in Salesforce which should trigger push events in case some entities changed, for example an opportunity was closed.
Zapier implemented something similar
https://zapier.com/apps/salesforce/integrations/webhook
Could not find something I need which is a simple way to subscribe to entity changes using the OAuth client's token and passing a webhook endpoint. I read about apex callouts, streaming API and outbound messages.
Yeah, we solved this exact problem at Fusebit and I can help you understand the process as well.
Typically speaking here's what you need to do:
Create triggers on the Salesforce Objects you want to get updates for
Upload Apex class that will send an outgoing message to a pre-determined URL
Enable Remote Site Setting for the Domain you want to send the message to
Add in Secret Verification (or other auth method) to prevent spamming of your external URL
If you're leveraging javascript, then you can use the jsforce sdk & salesforce tooling API to push the code into the salesforce instance AFTER the Auth flow has occurred AND on Salesforce Instances that have API access enabled (typically - this is enterprise and above OR professional with API enabled).
This will be helpful for you to look through: https://jamesward.com/2014/06/30/create-webhooks-on-salesforce-com/
FYI - Zapier's webhooks implementation is actually polling every 15 minutes, instead of real-time incoming events.
In which programming language?
For consuming outbound messages you just need to be able to accept an XML message and send back "Ack" message to acknowledge receiving, otherwise SF will keep trying to resend it for 24h.
For consuming platform events / streaming API / Change Data Capture (CDC) you'll need to raise the event in SF (Platform Event you could raise from code, flow, process builder, CDC would happen automatically, you just tell it which objects it should track).
And then in client app you'd need to login to SF (SOAP or REST API), subscribe to channel (any library that supports cometd should be fine). Have you seen "EMP Connector", mentioned for example in https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/change-data-capture/subscribe-to-events?trail_id=architect-solutions-with-the-right-api ?
Picking right messaging way is an art, there's free course that can help: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/trails/architect-solutions-with-the-right-api
And pretty awesome PDF if you want to study for certification: https://resources.docs.salesforce.com/sfdc/pdf/integration_patterns_and_practices.pdf

Display realtime data in reactjs

I'm sending data from my backend every 10 seconds and I wanted to display that data in reactjs. I've searched on the net to use socket.io to display real-time data. Is there a better way to use it?
If you're dead set on updating your data every 10 seconds, it would make more sense to make a request from the client to the server, as HTTP requests can only be opened from client to server. By using HTTP requests, you won't need to use socket.io, but socket.io is an easy alternative if you need much faster requests.
Depending on how you are generating the data being sent from your backend, specifically if you are using a database, there is most likely a way to subscribe to changes in the database. This would actually update the data in realtime, without a 10 second delay.
If you want a more detailed answer, you'll have to provide more detail regarding your question: what data are you sending? where is it coming from or how are you generating it?
I'm working on an autodialer feature, in which an agent will get a call when I trigger the button from the frontend (using react js language), and then automatically all the leads in the agent assigned portal will get back-to-back calls from agent number. However, because this process is automatic, the agent won't know who the agent has called, so I want to establish a real-time connection so that I can show a popup on the frontend that contains information about the lead who was called.

How to create an online-offline application using servicestack

I'm trying to figure out how to create an offline / online approch to use within a huge application.
Right now, each part of the application has its own model and datalayer, who directly read / write data from / to SQL. My boss is asking me to create a kind of buffer that, in case of connectivity failure, might be used to store data until the connection to SQL return active.
What I'm trying to create is something like this: move all datalayers into a servicestack service. Each "GET" method should query the database and store the result into a cache to be reused once the connection to SQL is not available. Each "POST" and "PUT" method must execute their actions or store the request into a cache if the connection fail. this cache must be cleared once the connection to SQL is restored.
How can I achieve this? Mine is a WPF application running on Windows 10.
Best regards
Enrico
Maintaining caches on the server is not going to help create an offline Application given the client wouldn't have access to the server in order to retrieve those caches. What you'd need instead is to maintain state on the client so in the event that network access is lost the client is loading from its own local caches.
Architecturally this is easiest achieved with a Web App using a Single Page App framework like Vue (+ Vuex) or React (+ Redux or MobX). The ServiceStack TechStacks and Gistlyn Apps are good (well documented) examples of this where they store client state in a Vuex store (for TechStacks created in Vue) or Redux Store (for Gistlyn created in React), or the Old TechStacks (created with AngularJS).
For good examples of this checkout Gistlyn's snapshots feature where the entire client state can be restored from a single serialized JSON object or approach used the Real Time Network Traveler example where an initial client state and delta's can be serialized across the network to enable real-time remote control of multiple connected clients.
They weren't developed with offline in mind, but their architecture naturally leads to being offline capable, courtesy of each page being first loaded from its local store then it fires off a Request to update its local cache which thanks to the reactivity of JS SPA fx's, the page is automatically updated with the latest version of the server.
Messaging APIs
HTTP has synchronous tight coupling which isn't ideal for offline communication, what you want instead is to design your write APIs so they're One Way/Asynchronous so you can implement a message queue on the client which queues up Request DTOs and sends them reliably to the server by resending them (using an exponential backoff) until the succeed without error. Then for cases where the client needs to be notified that their request has been processed they can either be done via Server Events or via the client long-polling the server checking to see if their request has been processed.

How to handle long requests on the frontend?

My application allows a user to enter a URL of an article he/she wishes to analyze. It goes through our API gateway to reach the correct services engaged in this process. The analysis takes between 5 and 30 seconds depending on the article's word count.
For now, my reactjs client sends the request to the API and waits for 5 to 30 seconds to receive the response. Is there a better way to handle this such as enqueuing the job and let the API ping the client (reactjs frontend) once it has been done?
Server-sent Events (SSEs) allow your server to push new information to your browser, and hence look ideal to me for this purpose. They work over HTTP and there is good support for all browsers except for IE.
So the new process could look as follows:
Client send request to server, which initiates the lookup and potentially responds with the topic the browser needs to subscribe to (in case that's unique per lookup)
Server does its thing and sends updates as it processes new content. See how the beauty of this is that you could inform your client about partial updates.
If SSEs is not an option to you, you could leverage good old Websockets for bi-directional communication, but for such a simple endeavor, it might be too much technology to solve the problem.
A third alternative, especially if you are talking amongst services (no web or mobile clients on the other side) is to use web-hooks, so that the interested party would expose and listen on a specific endpoint, that the publisher (the server that does the processing) would write updates to.
Hope this is useful.

GWT Servlet-based Notification (Server Event Bus)

Can anyone think of a good way to allow the server to notify the client based upon server processing? For example, consider the following events:
A user requests a deletion of data, however, due to it's long-running time, we kick it off to a queue.
The client receives a "Yes we completed your transaction successfully".
The server deletes the item and now wants to update any local structures any clients may be using (I'd also like to notify the user).
I know this can be done by client-side polling. Is there a event bus type way to do this? Any suggestions are welcome, but please keep in mind I am using GWT with App Engine.
The standard AJAX interaction is that the client sends requests to the server and expects some sort of response back fairly quickly.
In order for the server to initiate a request to the client, you will need to use WebSockets, and experimental HTML5 feature currently only supported by Chrome.
Or, to simulate this kind of interaction, you can use Comet (long-polling), made available in GWT by the rocket-gwt project.
You want server events for GWT? Have a look at GwtEventService (they couldn't have chosen a better name): http://code.google.com/p/gwteventservice/wiki/StartPage
Of course, it uses a Comet implementation, but you can't do any different when using HTTP, the client always initiates the communication. Request, response.

Resources