Salesforce Integration with Microsoft.NET using SOAP API

Introduction

Salesforce has set of APIs for different purposes such as REST API for accessing objects in Salesforce, SOAP API for Integrating Salesforce with other applications, Tooling API for building custom development tools for Salesforce applications, Chatter REST API for accessing Salesforce Chatter feeds and social data, Bulk API for loading or deleting large numbers of records in Salesforce, Metadata API for managing customizations in Salesforce and building tools to manage metadata model, Streaming API for providing a stream of data reflecting data changes in Salesforce, Apex REST API for building REST API in Apex, Apex SOAP API  for creating custom SOAP Web services in Apex and finally Data.com API for Data.com providing  100% complete, high quality data, updated in real-time in the cloud.

SOAP API is simple, powerful, and secure application programming interface to integrating salesforce with Microsoft .NET which allows to manipulate Salesforce data with more than 20 different calls so, let see how it does with C#.NET.

Salesforce Integration with Microsoft.NET

First, it requires to establish a bridge in between Salesforce organization and the Microsoft.NET application and to do so, we must generate the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file which describes how the web service can be used.  Once logged into the Salesforce organization, navigate to following route to generate the WSDL.

Setup à   Develop à API à Then choose the appropriate WSDL and generate it

In the API section there are Enterprise, Partner, Apex, Metadata and Tooling WSDLs and for accessing standard and custom object records we can either use Enterprise WSDL which is strongly typed and integrates only single Salesforce organization or Partner WSDL which is loosely typed and integrates multiple Salesforce organizations.

We may download the preferred WSDL if we are planning to create the bride as a service reference but since the description could be changed when creating new objects or adding new fields to existing objects, it is better to create the bride as a web reference so, we just need the web address of the generated WSDL which is the browser URL. Let’s see how we can do this in Visual Studio 2017.

Open the Visual Studio 2017 and follow the following steps.

Project à Add Service Reference à Advance à Add Web Referenceà 

Locate the WSDLà Log in to Salesforceà Add Reference

Once you done with the referencing the web service then we can move to coding part and all the relevant meta data of the web service is stored in the App.config and Settings.settings which we can change dynamically at run time, whenever it requires to change the source of the Salesforce organization.

Secondly, we must have to authenticate before accessing Salesforce data and to do so, first we must make sure that the login user’s profile has the API Enabled permission at Salesforce side which allows to male API request to the Salesforce organization. It will not allow to perform any data operation if this permission is unchecked.

Now let see how we can connect to Salesforce with SOAP API in C#.Net.

SforceService sfLoginClient = new SforceService ();

// Connect with Salesforce credentials (You may not need to provide security token when you specify a login IP range)

LoginResult  sfLoginResult = sfLoginClient.login(USERNAME, PASSWORD+SECURITY_TOKEN);

// Reset the Destination or Endpoint URL

sfLoginClient.Url = sfLoginResult.serverUrl;

// Set the session header

sfLoginClient.SessionHeaderValue = sfLoginResult.sessionId;

You should handle exceptions in case of unable to authenticate, password expired or any other run time exceptions and let’s move to query Salesforce records by assuming all is well up to now.

QueryResult sfQueryResult = sfLoginClient.query(SOQL_QUERY);

Once you execute the query method with the correct SOQL, you will get the query result but in Salesforce default batch size 500 which means you will get only 500 records if you not specified it. Even though you specified the maximum batch size is 2000 and this is also not guaranteed. So, let see how we can do this.

You need to write the below code block before you execute the above-mentioned query method.

sfLoginClient.QueryOptionsValue = new QueryOptions();

sfLoginClient.QueryOptionsValue.batchSize = INTEGER_BATCH_SIZE;

sfLoginClient.QueryOptionsValue.batchSizeSpecified = true;

When you need to move to next query set, just call the below line of code.

sfQueryResult =  sfLoginClient.queryMore(sfQueryResult.queryLocator);

You can get the returned records to sObject array but executing the following code line.

Object[] sfRecords = sfQueryResult .records;

You can use the following code block to loop through the record set and retrieve the field values and with the same manner you can set the values for the desired fields.

foreach (sObject record in sfRecords)

{

               XmlElement[] elements = record.Any; // Get the xml which holds the values

              for (int i = 0; i < elements.Length; i++)

    {

                //elements[i].LocalName à give you the field name

//elements[i].InnerText)à give you the field value

             }

}

Let’s see how we can perform Insert, Update, Upsert and Delete Salesforce data. Generally, we can create new sObject and perform Insert, Update or Upsert operations as shown below.

Account acc = new Account();

Acc.Name = “Account Virath”;

SaveResult[] sfCreateResult = sfLoginClient. create(new sObject[] { acc }); // Insert Record

Acc.Id = ID; // Specify the relevant ID

Acc.Name = “Account Virath Chinthaka”;

SaveResult[] sfUpdateResult = sfLoginClient.update(new sObject[] { acc }); // Update Record

  

// Specify the relevant ID if it is an Update, otherwise no need to set it which will create a new record

Acc.Id = ID;

Acc.Name = “Account Virath Chinthaka Liyanage”;

// For Upsert method. it requires to set the external Id field

UpsertResult[] sfUpsertResult = sfLoginClient. upsert (EXTERNAL_ID, new sObject[] { acc });

We can check whether the operation is successful by property: success in the 0^th index of the result array and we can get the error message as shown below.

if (!sfUpsertResult [0].success)

{

      throw new Exception(sfUpsertResult [0].errors[0].message);

}

If it sent more than one sObject where we can send max 200 records per time, then we can loop result array and see whether all are successful or has errors. Also, we can Insert, Update or Upsert records dynamically and in that case, we should instantiate new sObject and set the entity type as shown below.

sObject sfRecord = new sObject();

sfRecord.type = ENTITY_TYPE; // Object Type in String. E.g.:- “Account”

Then set the values like shown below.

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();

// Specify the field name correctly otherwise it will raise an error while pushing it to Salesforce

XmlElement newField = doc.CreateElement(FIELD_NAME);

// Specify the field value in String format

newField.InnerText = FIELD_VALUE;

// If you already have values specified then make sure you append it

sfRecord.Any = new XmlElement[] { newField };

We can delete Salesforce records by specifying the relevant Ids as shown below and that’s it!

DeleteResult[] sfDeleteResult = sfLoginClient.delete(new String[] { ID_1, ID_2, … });

Conclusion

The aim of this blog is to share how we can connect to Salesforce organization from .NET platform and manipulate Salesforce data where we can perform select, insert, update and delete operations.