How to push Salesforce Order to an external REST API? - api

Question

I have experience in Salesforce administration, but not in Salesforce development.
My task is to push a Order in Salesforce to an external REST API, if the order is in the custom status "Processing" and the Order Start Date (EffectiveDate) is in 10 days.
The order will be than processed in the down-stream system.
If the order was successfully pushed to the REST API the status should be changed to "Activated".
Can anybody give me some example code to get started?

Answer 1

There's very cool guide for picking right mechanism, I've been studying from this PDF for one of SF certifications: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.integration_patterns_and_practices.meta/integration_patterns_and_practices/integ_pat_intro_overview.htm
A lot depends on whether the endpoint is accessible from Salesforce (if it isn't - you might have to pull data instead of pushing), what authentication it needs.
For push out of Salesforce you could use
Outbound Message - it'd be an XML document sent when (time-based in your case?) workflow fires, not REST but it's just clicks, no code. The downside is that it's just 1 object in message. So you can send Order header but no line items.
External Service would be code-free and you could build a flow with it.
You could always push data with Apex code (something like this). We'd split the solution into 2 bits.
The part that gets actual work done: At high level you'd write function that takes list of Order ids as parameter, queries them, calls req.setBody(JSON.serialize([SELECT Id, OrderNumber FROM Order WHERE Id IN :ids]));... If the API needs some special authentication - you'd look into "Named Credentials". Hard to say what you'll need without knowing more about your target.
And the part that would call this Apex when the time comes. Could be more code (a nightly scheduled job that makes these callouts 1 minute after midnight?) https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/226403/how-to-schedule-an-apex-batch-with-callout
Could be a flow / process builder (again, you probably want time-based flows) that calls this piece of Apex. The "worker" code would have to "implement interface" (a fancy way of saying that the code promises there will be function "suchAndSuchName" that takes "suchAndSuch" parameters). Check Process.Plugin out.
For pulling data... well, target application could login to SF (SOAP, REST) and query the table of orders once a day. Lots of integration tools have Salesforce plugins, do you already use Azure Data Factory? Informatica? BizTalk? Mulesoft?
There's also something called "long polling" where client app subscribes to notifications and SF pushes info to them. You might have heard about CometD? In SF-speak read up about Platform Events, Streaming API, Change Data Capture (although that last one fires on change and sends only the changed fields, not great for pushing a complete order + line items). You can send platform events from flows too.
So... don't dive straight to coding the solution. Plan a bit, the maintenance will be easier. This is untested, written in Notepad, I don't have org with orders handy... But in theory you should be able to schedule it to run at 1 AM for example. Or from dev console you can trigger it with Database.executeBatch(new OrderSyncBatch(), 1);
public class OrderSyncBatch implements Database.Batchable, Database.AllowsCallouts {
public Database.QueryLocator start(Database.BatchableContext bc) {
Date cutoff = System.today().addDays(10);
return Database.getQueryLocator([SELECT Id, Name, Account.Name, GrandTotalAmount, OrderNumber, OrderReferenceNumber,
(SELECT Id, UnitPrice, Quantity, OrderId FROM OrderItems)
FROM Order
WHERE Status = 'Processing' AND EffectiveDate = :cutoff]);
}
public void execute(Database.BatchableContext bc, List<sObject> scope) {
Http h = new Http();
List<Order> toUpdate = new List<Order>();
// Assuming you want 1 order at a time, not a list of orders?
for (Order o : (List<Order>)scope) {
HttpRequest req = new HttpRequest();
HttpResponse res;
req.setEndpoint('https://example.com'); // your API endpoint here, or maybe something that starts with "callout:" if you'd be using Named Credentials
req.setMethod('POST');
req.setHeader('Content-Type', 'application/json');
req.setBody(JSON.serializePretty(o));
res = h.send(req);
if (res.getStatusCode() == 200) {
o.Status = 'Activated';
toUpdate.add(o);
}
else {
// Error handling? Maybe just debug it, maybe make a Task for the user or look into
// Database.RaisesPlatformEvents
System.debug(res);
}
}
update toUpdate;
}
public void finish(Database.BatchableContext bc) {}
public void execute(SchedulableContext sc){
Database.executeBatch(new OrderSyncBatch(), Limits.getLimitCallouts()); // there's limit of 10 callouts per single transaction
// and by default batches process 200 records at a time so we want smaller chunks
// https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.apexref.meta/apexref/apex_methods_system_limits.htm
// You might want to tweak the parameter even down to 1 order at a time if processing takes a while at the other end.
}
}