Pulling Data From Salesforce into Drupal

Posted by mtbosworth on March 23, 2011 at 2:43pm

Hello everyone. I am working on a project to setup up Drupal as a case tracker front end for Salesforce giving end users the ability to provide a feedback. I recently setup a simple Drupal Pressflow instance with Salesforce integration and was able to submit cases and users to my development Salesforce account. Awesome. Now I need the Drupal sites to be able to pull statuses of the cases back from Salesforce to keep end users up-to-date on the cases that they've created. This is my question for the Salesforce group: What is the best way to pull data back from Salesforce? What are the options? Thanks.

Comments

I am very interested in this.

Posted by TimAlsop on March 23, 2011 at 3:05pm

TimAlsop's picture

I am very interested in this. I was trying to find somebody to develop something similar, but couldn't find anybody, so I have started to integrated my Drupal website with the Salesforce Self-Service Portal instead, inside an IFrame. Maybe your solution can be used instead ? If you are interested and able, can you contact me so we can discuss this via telephone ? I have budget to pay for such development.

which Salesforce integration?

Posted by aaronbauman on March 23, 2011 at 3:21pm

aaronbauman's picture

Which module are you using for the Salesforce integration?

Salesforce Suite includes sf_notifications, which acts as a responder to Salesforce Outbound Messages -- this is a "push" method. "Push" is sufficient if you have a relatively low throughput (Outbound Messages count against your API quota), and will ensure your site serves live data.

The other option would be a "pull" method, where you build a cron job to poll Salesforce for changes to relevant data. SFAPI provides a nifty function, getUpdated(), which queries a particular object type over a particular timeframe. The "pull" method is not supported by Salesforce Suite (yet - will be included in a D7 release), but a wrapper is provided in the SF PHP toolkit, which you could use to build your solution. "Pull" can help reduce your API usage, but your data will be as stale as your cron period.

Salesforce Suite

Posted by mtbosworth on March 23, 2011 at 4:49pm

mtbosworth's picture

Yes, I am using Salesforce Suite. The "push" I have implemented successfully. Concerning your suggestion for implementing the "pull", I agree and was pursuing this method. Thanks for pointing out the getUpdated() method. I will give that a try.

Mike Bosworth
Balanced Scale Media, LLC
balancedscale.com