We will end this chapter with a quick overview of Salesforce integration. Salesforce is a cloud-based data management tool that allows organizations to store and manage their data in a collaborative way. Information about important contacts, related organizations, and any other custom piece of data that a team may need to share can be stored in Salesforce.

One advantage of using Salesforce to manage your data is that it includes many built-in reporting mechanisms. These are especially useful in medium-sized organizations that have enough people to make sharing data difficult, but do not have the time or resources to build a custom internal solution, like those we've seen earlier.

The difficulty with Salesforce, however, is that data must be entered. If you're collecting information via a Django application, it is stored in a local database. You could expose this data as we did in the beginning of this chapter using an API, but once exposed you still need tools to manipulate it.

Taking the Salesforce approach, we can push our Django database information into a Salesforce account, which can include custom objects that represent a subset of data we've collected in Django. These objects are defined via the Salesforce website, but typically resemble a table definition you would make in any SQL database.

Salesforce is accessible via a SOAP API and several Python wrapper libraries exist. One such library is salesforce-beatbox, which is available at: http://code.google.com/p/salesforce-beatbox/.

The beatbox application lets you receive and send information to your Salesforce instance. It requires very little in the way of Python code to get up and running. You will need to generate a security token from your Salesforce preferences page, but after you obtain this you can connect to the Salesforce API like so:

import beatbox
    
USER = '[email protected]'
PASSWD = 'xxxxx'
SECURITY_TOKEN = 'gds#mklz!'

svc = beatbox.PythonClient() tokenpass = '%s%s' % (PASSWD, SECURITY_TOKEN) svc.login(USER, tokenpass)

The svc object should now successfully be connected to Salesforce and we can begin querying our objects using the Salesforce query language, which they call SOQL:

result = svc.query("SELECT id,name FROM Merchandise__c")

The result variable contains a list of dictionary objects. Each dictionary has the keys specified in the SELECT statement and the corresponding values in the Salesforce table. Any custom object created in Salesforce will include a __c suffix when referenced in a query. We've created a Merchandise object in Salesforce, which we query above using the merchandise__c table.

Creating objects in Salesforce is equally as simple. To do so we need to construct a dictionary that includes the values for the object we want to create. A particularly important key that is required in all cases is type. The type key specifies what kind of Salesforce object we are creating. For example, the following dictionary sets up the new Merchandise object that we will create in Salesforce:

merch_data = {'name': 'Cranberry Sauce', 
                       'price_in_dollars__c': '1.50',
                       'type': 'Merchandise__c'}

Once we've created our data, we can send it to Salesforce using our svc object:

svc.create(data)

Updating Salesforce information is equally as straightforward. The only difference is that our data dictionary must include an id key whose value is the Salesforce unique ID number. This is in addition to a type key, which is also required for updates, as well as the fields which we want to update and their new values. It is not required that every field has a key in the update dictionary, only those we want to change. For example:

updated_data = {'id': '02111AC2DB987', 'type': 'Merchandise__c',
                'price_in_dollars__c': '1.75'} 
svc.update(updated_data)

Create and update calls to the Salesforce API can also perform bulk updates using their bulk API. This happens automatically when using beatbox when you construct your new or updated data as a list, instead of a single dictionary. Bulk updates are limited to 200 items per call, so some logic is required to slice your data lists to conform to this limit. It is also a requirement that all of the data you are sending to the Salesforce bulk API is of the same type.

SELECT Name, Description
FROM Merchandise__c
WHERE Name LIKE 'Cranberry'

SELECT Name, Description, Manufacturer.Address
FROM Merchandise__c
WHERE Manufacturer.Name == 'CranCo'