I'm looking to integrate my Salesforce implementation with an external database. I know that in most circumstances I would use Visualforce with an Apex controller/extension to access the data, however the external database will require a VPN connection. Since Visualforce and any controllers or extensions are processed server-side, is there any way to do this through a VPN?
The simplest solution that occurs to me would be to expose the data via a web service and then write an Apex webservice class to call the data. I've done this several times when data was behind a firewall.
For more complex integrations, where you actually wanted to store the external data in Salesforce with more complex logic it could be useful to use an integration tool like Jitterbit or Cast Iron to do this for you.
Related
We are a SaaS product and we would like to be able have per-user data exports that will be used with various analytical (BI) tools like Tableau or PowerBI. Instead of just managing all those exports manually, we thought of using some cloud database such as AWS Redshift (which will be part of our service). But then, it is not clear how is user will access those databases naturally, unless we do some kind of SSO integration with AWS.
So - what is the best practice for exporting data for analytics use in SaaS products?
In this case you can build your security in to your backend API layer.
First you can set up processes to load your data to Redshift, then make sure that only your backend API server/cluster has access to redshift (e.g. through a vpc with no external ip access to redshift)
Now you have your data, you can validate your user as usual through your backend service, then when a user requests a download through the backend API, the backend can create a query to extract from redshift only the correct data based upon the users security role. In order to make this possible you may need to build some kind of security column into your redshift data model.
I am assuming getting data to redshift is not a problem.
What you are looking for, if I understand correctly is a OEM solutions.
The problem is how does one mimic the security model you have in place for your SaaS offering.
That depends on how complex is your security model.
If it is as simple as just authenticate the user and he has access to all tenant data or the data can be easily filtered for user. Things are simple for you. Trusted authentication will allow you to authenticate that user and user filtering will allow you to show him all that he has access to.
But here is the kicker, if your security is really complex , then it can become really difficult to mimic it within these products.
Here for integrating tableau this link will help:-
https://tableau.github.io/embedding-playbook/#
Power BI, this product am not a fan off. I tried to embed a view in one my applications and data refresh was a big issue.
Its almost like they want you to be a azure shop for real time reporting.( I like GCP more )
If you create the api's and populate datasets then they have crazy restrictions like 1MB/sec etc.
On the other instances datasets can be refreshed only 8 times.
I gave up on them.
Very recently I got a call from Sisense and they seemed promising as well from a OEM perspective. You might was to try them.
Let me start with a bit of background: I'm helping a non-profit organization that would like to have a browser-based application that is backed by Salesforce, but has very specific requirements.
I see Salesforce has a REST API that we can call, so we can develop a standalone application to serve the web pages they want and use the REST API to call Salesforce when needed.
I'm wondering if there is a way to host a web application directly on Salesforce; this way we don't have to have a separate application server. Any recommendations or pointers to documentation/open source products is greatly appreciated.
Yes, you can create services that will allow your app to hit Salesforce
Depending on the type of application, yes you can host it on salesforce using the Salesforce Sites feature, also you can develop and host your app on Heroku which is owned by salesforce and can sync data to and from salesforce using Heroku Connect, or you can build and host it on another service like AWS and connect via the REST API. You just need to investigate and choose the option that best fits your use-case. One thing to be aware of is that there are API limits (the number of calls you can make to salesforce in a rolling 24hr period). Depending the the needs of the app be sure to see if those limits will be an issue. Because if the app makes constant calls to salesforce that could be an issue. But there are things you can do to get around that, like caching.
Yes, both Force.com Sites and Site.com features allow you to host webpages on the Force.com Platform. The markup is stored in Visualforce Pages and can use Apex to access records in the Database. I have migrated multiple websites (including our company's www.mkpartners.com) to Force.com using Force.com Sites.
One thing to keep in mind is that you are limited to 500,000 views per month and the rendering of a page with images that are also stored on the platform will incur a single view for the page and a single view for each image. If you already have a very popular website, I wouldn't migrate. If you're a small business or nonprofit, then it should be fine.
Another thing to keep in mind is that dynamic functionality based on records in the database will not work during maintenance windows. There is the ability to upload a static version of your website to be rendered during these windows though.
I'm planning to build web application on top of a REST api. I have been thinking about 2 different ways to write web UI layer for controlling the views, user session management, etc.
One way : Just write everything in Javascript using Angular or similar frameworks. But, the problem I see here is, user session management and also it may not be good idea to expose everything to client. I'm thinking anybody with good knowledge of web design, can find out javascript logic and end points.
second way: Write a thin controller and user session management layer on REST in may be Spring web mvc project / Node JS, etc, and control everything from there. But, the problems I see here are, we have to have some end point lookup logic here, to map web ui request to REST end point. Everytime, we we add more end points, we have to maintain that catalog as well. Also, the JSONs will go through many transformations, and which may add some overhead.
can anybody suggest some architecture ideas for this ? Am I missing anything here ? Can we write secure Javascript web ui layer on REST ?
I was also thinking about having Message broker like RabbitMQ to scale it. Any suggestions are appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
You should first decide on how you divide responsibilities between the client and the server. What do you want the server to do, and what do you want the client to do? You already figured out that the server should hide the sensitive information, to keep the application secure. Is there anything else you need from the server? If there is a database, you probably also want to let the server handle all access to the database.
Notice that there are also alternatives such as Firebase, where they take care of the backend for you, and you focus on the front-end mainly. Might save you a lot of work on authentication, and data access.
You also need to think what kind of communication style they will be using? If it is Request-Response, then REST is suitable. If it is some kind of bidirectional messaging such as chat, I recommend to take a look at Meteor. In Meteor, you write in Javascript for front-end, back-end and mobile.
You mentioned that you're concerned with having to transform your Jsons often. If you do your server-side with NodeJS, this problem disappears. It's Javascript on the server-side.
There are many ways to implement an application. You can more specifics about what you're trying to do, and then we may recommend the frameworks that are better for you.
Currently I am working on an ERP Project, Using Entity FrameWork and WCF at server side and WPF at client side. Since it is a big project , we have a lot of entities.What we did so far is, Created Service contracts for each Entities and exposed with multiple endpoints.The Problem is we had to add Service Reference for each Service and we are feeling difficult to manage these web services.
1.Is this a proper way ?
if yes,
2.Is there any way to allocate these web services (in classes or folders)..?
Thanks in advance.
You don't want to keep generating the proxy classes in the client.
Just move the POCO classes and contracts to single assembly which you can reference in the server and client. Then create the necessary channels in the client with ChannelFactory.
ChannelFactory(TChannel)
If you are dealing with many services you can create routing service which will behave like facade. Once you have routing service defined then all requests are going to be sent towards routing service and then, based on some criteria, provided to specific service. You are dealing with only one service so if any change in sub-services occures, for instance endpoint's address is altered, then such a change needs to be reflected only in routing service.
Finally i got how to deal with multiple Services
i am considering to use svcutil.exe in order to create proxy classes.
so that we can arrange those classes in folders, and also we can
get more control over proxies
My organization wants to be able to regularly read in data from an external web service which provides an ODBC interface, and update our salesforce data with that information. I've been hunting around Salesforce's documentation, and it seems like there's no way to do this except by using the Apex Data Loader's batch functionality. Unfortunately, this means that my organization would have to maintain a local computer to run the data loader nightly, which we're trying to avoid doing.
What we'd like to do is create an Apex Schedulable class or something similar and run code that can access the ODBC interface from our external data source on the salesforce platform itself. Is it possible to do this?
There's no support for making outbound ODBC connections from salesforce. If the external service has an HTTP based API, then you use the http client in apex to make the api calls and get the data.
Outbound as mentioned you'd have to make wrap your database in a webservice. You could load the data in using data loader/Talend/Informatica/etc.