💃 CRUSH that Salesforce Integration Project!🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! How many of you Salesforce professionals out there have helped with an integration project? Or are you about to? Maybe you even want to! 🤪 The ChaCha’s got your back! 💪 Let’s unpack the popular integration patterns listed by the Mothership itself!

Agenda for today includes

• Foundations

• Six Integration Patterns

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Foundations

Why should you care about integration patterns? Or integrations at all? I mean, we’re Salesforce professionals. All we really need to care about is sharing rules, flows, and resetting passwords, right?!? 😡

How many orgs have you seen live in isolation? No need to integrate with any other system. We run our business strictly on Salesforce!! That’s what we thought - none. Businesses routinely use 100’s of applications! You’re going need to deal with this. 💯

Six Integration Patterns

🔥 Request and Reply

Salesforce is the requesting system here. Our beloved cloud 💕 sends a call to a remote system then waits for the process to complete and the response to be sent back. Say you need Salesforce to update an order in an ERP and then immediately update the order in Salesforce when it’s done - request and reply baby!

🔥 Fire and Forget

Salesforce is the requesting system here too. We send another call to a remote system only this time we’re not hanging around for the operation to complete or for the response back - we’re moving on! 🏎️ If you’re just looking to notify another system of a thing happening in Salesforce and don’t care about anything after that then use this!

🔥 Batch Data Synchronization

This pattern can be invoked from within Salesforce or outside of it. Basically a batch job is spun up that sync’s data across systems. Need to extract Accounts from Salesforce, transform them and hydrate a SQL database? What about the reverse? This is your pattern! 💥

🔥 Remote Call-In

Switching it up now - Salesforce is the target 🎯 system here! So this is an inbound integration where your org receives a call from another system. Usually this is to read or modify data somehow. There are lots of options here - custom endpoints with Apex, standard endpoints, Composite API, Bulk API, etc..

🔥 UI Update Based on Data Changes

Getting a bit more advanced here. Salesforce is considered the requesting system again. We’re listening for an event (PushTopic, CDC, PE) sent by an external system/component and then updating the UI to show the change. A simple example here would be writing an LWC that subscribes to a Platform Event. When the event is caught by the component, it refreshes automatically! 🪄

🔥 Data Virtualization

All we’re talking about with this one is displaying data in Salesforce that doesn’t live in Salesforce. So, we establish a connection to another system, fetch the data, display it and let the users work with it. Salesforce Connect is a popular solution here. If you can’t fork out the cash 💰 for that then you can also follow the Request and Reply pattern to implement your own!

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes