💃 Simplify your inbound integrations 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Integrations can be hard. 💯 

Between sync vs async, data transformations, field mappings … it’s a mine field out there! 💥 

We’ve written about some of these complexities before -

• Different integration options 

• Sending events to AWS

• Closing the loop on those events

But, we haven’t yet covered much in terms of the inbound integration capabilities of Salesforce.

There’s a lot. 😵‍💫 

As we always do, we’ll just start small. 🤏 

Today let’s peek at a “recent” enhancement made to the REST API that can help simplify things a bit …

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Simplify your inbound integrations

• A little background

• Where's the problem?

• Expanding the depth

• Conclusion

INTRO TO REST QUERIES

A little background

One of the most important and well-known features of the Salesforce platform is their REST API.

This thing is loaded with goodies! 🍬🍭

Devs use the REST API to create, operator on, or search for data by sending HTTP requests to endpoints in Salesforce.

Powerful stuff.

A recent enhancement to the Query resource makes it even that much more powerful. 💪 

In a nutshell, the Query resource let’s you send SOQL queries to a standard endpoint in Salesforce.

Salesforce will execute the query and return up to 2000 records in it’s response. If more than 2000 records match the query criteria then a locator is also returned so you can retrieve the remaining records. 🧠 

This is ideal for devs building something outside of Salesforce that needs data from the org. 🔥 

Just OAuth, construct your query, hit the endpoint, then process the data.

Pretty slick, huh? I’ve always liked this endpoint whenever I had to write an integration like that.

But, there was always this built in limitation … 🫠 

NESTED QUERIES

Where’s the problem?

If your app needed to fetch related data more than two levels deep then you had some hoops to jump through. 🦘 

What I mean is this:

👆️ This query will return a list of Contacts for every Account returned.

What happens if my app requires that I go deeper? Say … three more levels deep?

Let’s say we now need:

Account → Contact → Asset → WorkOrder → WorkOrderLineItem

Well, it can be done, but it ain’t pretty.

The REST API v57.0 and earlier used to be have a two-level limit on parent-to-child relationships in a query.

Meaning, since our app requires us to go five levels deep now, we would be forced to make a series of API calls and run multiple SOQL statements to achieve our objective. 👎️ 

✅ Run query to get Account and Contact records

✅ Extract all Contact Ids

✅ Run query to get Asset and WorkOrder records

✅ Extract all WorkOrder Ids

✅ Run query to get WorkOrderLineItem records

See what I mean by jumping through hoops now?

We needed to make three separate API calls and manage the relationships ourselves. 🤢 

QUERY MORE DATA

Expanding the depth

With v58.0 and above you can now send queries that go up to five 🖐️ levels deep natively!

That negates the need to spin up some solution like what we just talked about 👆️ and let’s us just send a single query to get all the that we need!

Like this:

All we do now is package the query we need into an API callout and send it once. 💥 

We get a nice, nested JSON response back with all the data we need, relationships fully in-tact, and minimal resources consumed.

No more hoops! 🚫 

Unless you need more than five levels …

WRAPPING IT UP

Conclusion

At the end of the day, this is a value-add. ➕ 

Allowing devs to nest more SOQL queries will:

✅ Reduce complexity

✅ Save time

✅ Lead to more efficient solutions

✅ Save on API call limits

Anytime Salesforce can make experiences with their platform better it’s a win in my book! 🥳 

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Salesforce Memes