Here at Service Objects, we are dedicated to helping our clients integrate our data quality services as quickly as possible. One of the ways we help is educating our clients on the best ways to integrate our services with whatever application they may be using. One such application where our tools are simple to implement is Salesforce.
Salesforce is, among other things, a powerful, extensible and customizable CRM. One of the advantages of Salesforce’s extensibility is that users can set up triggers to make external API calls. This is great for Service Objects’ customers, as it allows APIs calls to any our DOTS web services and helps ensure their contact data in Salesforce is corrected and verified.
In the video below, we will demonstrate how to set up a trigger that will call our DOTS Address Validation 3 service whenever a contact is added to our list of contacts. See full transcript below.
Hello, and welcome to Service Objects video tutorial series. For today’s tutorial we’ll be setting up a trigger and a class in Salesforce that will call out to our DOTS Address Validation 3 web service. If you don’t already know, Salesforce is an extremely powerful, extensible and customizable CRM. One of the great things that we like about Salesforce here at Service Objects is the ability to call out to APIs so that the data going into your CRM can be validated and verified before it gets entered. This means that you can call out to any of our APIs from Salesforce. You can use this video as an overview for how to integrate any of the service, but for this specific example, we’ll be using DOTS Address Validation 3.
To participate in this tutorial, you need the following items. A Service Objects web service key, whether that is a trial key or a production key. You can sign up for a free trial key at www.serviceobjects.com. You will need a developer account in Salesforce. You will also need a working knowledge of Salesforce and Apex, which is the native programming language inside Salesforce. We will go ahead and get started.
To start off, one of the first things we’ll need to do is add the Service Objects endpoint into the list of allowed endpoints that Salesforce is allowed to contact within your developer platform. To do this, you can navigate here and type in remote site settings, or remote, and the remote site settings field will pop up. Here, you’ll see a list of all the websites that your Salesforce platform is allowed to contact. In my account here you can see I have sws.serviceobjects.com and swsbackup.serviceobjects.com. To add a new site, you’ll go and select new remote site. Give an appropriate name, and you will type in the URL here. You can see for this example I’m going to type in trial.serviceobjects.com which will only work if you have a trial license key. If you have a production key, you want to add sws.serviceobjects.com and swsbackup.serviceobjects.com as those will be the two primary URLs that you will be hitting with your production Service Objects account.
This trial.serviceobjects.com URL will only work with trial license keys. Click save and new or just save. You see here if we go back to our remote site settings, you can see that trial.serviceobjects.com was successfully added to our remote site settings. Now that we have successfully added the Service Objects endpoint, we’ll want to add some custom objects in our contact field that will hold some of the values that are returned by our DOTS Address Validation 3 web service. To do that, we’ll scroll down and go to customize. In our example we’re using the contacts field, but you can add custom fields to whatever field is most appropriate for your application, and we’ll select add custom field to contacts. Once we are here, we will scroll down and scroll to this contact custom fields and relationship. You can see here I have several custom fields here already defined. I have a DPV, mostly DPV information and error information, which our field set will parse out from our Address Validation 3 response.
We’ll add another field here for the sake of example. For this field we’re going to add the Is Residential Flag that comes back from the Address Validation 3 service. For this we’ll select text, select next, and here we’re going to go ahead and enter an appropriate field name, which I have in my clipboard. We’re going to call it DotsAddrVal_IsResidential. If you hover over this little “i,” it will say this is the label. This is the label to be used on displays, pages layouts, reports, and list views. This will be a more of a pretty type display. You’ll want to name it something more appropriate and something that will work better in your workflow, but for our example we’re just going to name it this.
For length, we’re going to do length of 15, and for the field name we’re just going to call it AddrValIsResidential. This is the internal field name here. When you’re calling an internal field name, you’ll have to add a double underscore and C in the Apex class. We’ll see an example of that in the next piece of code that we’re going to add. We’ll select next. You’ll select the appropriate field level security here. Next again, and go ahead and click save. To add the actual code that will call out to our Address Validation 3 web service, we’ll scroll down here, go to develop Apex classes. I have already added the class to my developer console, but just for the sake of example, I’ll go ahead and delete it and re-add it. I already have the code in a text editor, so I’m just going to copy and paste that, and just go over the code and explain some key points of it.
Now that I have my code copy and pasted in, I’ll walk through some key elements of it. In the sample code that we have, we have some extra commented out information here that gives you some resources like the product page, the developer guide. You can download this sample code along with this tutorial so you don’t have to pause the video and type it out and everything. The first thing we do is substantiate some of the HTTP request objects in this call WS by ID method. We’ll pull back the contact that’s just been added, and so we’ll pull back all these fields. Mailing street, mailing city, postal code, and state as well as the custom DPV and error information fields that we’ve entered into Salesforce. To call an internal field, an internal custom field that you’ve created in Salesforce, you’ll need to add this double underscore C at the end of it. We can see that we’ve done that here and other place where we reference these objects in the code.
Here, you can see we set the endpoint of the request to the trial URL endpoint, and this will point to the GetBestMatches JSON operation, so this will return a JSON formatted output. We’ve URL encoded all of the address information here. As you can see with this EncodingUtil.urlEncode. We’ll encode it to the UTF-8 standard. Another thing to note here is that you’ll have to put in your license key in this field here. Right now we just have it as a generic WS72 XXX, etc, but you’ll want to put in your specific license key. Here, we’ll send a request to the service, and if the response back is null, then that means there was something wrong with the primary endpoint, so we’ll come back here and check out our backup endpoint. For this example, it’s pointing to the same URL, the same trial endpoint. If you have a production key, you will want to point this primary URL to sws.serviceobjects.com, and this backup URL to swsbackup.serviceobjects.com . You’ll want to be sure to change both the license keys to whatever your license key is.
After that failover configuration, we’ll see here we checked the status code. If it’s equal to 200, we’ll go into processing the response from the service. Create some internal address fields here, and we’ll initialize the error response here to none, which would indicate that no error was returned from the service. What this does is it traverses through the JSON response of the service, and it finds the appropriate field. For this case we’ll see if it finds address1, it will set our initial address field to the address1 that was returned from the service. That will be the standardize and validated address information that is returned. We do that with all the fields that are pertinent to us. The DPV and DPV description, DPV notes description, as well as the IsResidential and error fields down here.
Here, you can see if we get a DPV score equal to 1. That indicates that the address is mailable, it is deliverable, and it is considered good by the USPS. This is the L-statement for the 200 code check here. If the 200 code wasn’t right, then we’ll say put the error description as this generic error message. At the end of this, we’ll update the list of contacts, so we’ll go ahead and click save. Now that we have our TestUtil class made here, we’ll go ahead and scroll down, select Apex triggers. To add a new trigger, we’ll select developer console, select file, new, trigger. For a name, we’ll simply call it Test Trigger.
We’ll go down here and select the contact object. We have the little bit of code right here. I have the actual code in a text editor that will call the service, so I’ll just copy that in. Now that I have this copied, you can see here that whenever a contact is added, or before it’s inserted rather, it will call the class that we made which was called WS by ID, and it will send the contact to it. To save this, just simply go to file and save. Hit refresh. We can see we now have a test trigger here. Now, to add a contact and to test out our new trigger, we’ll simply go up here, select contacts. In recent contacts, you can see here we don’t have any, so let’s go ahead and add one. We’ll add in a fake person by the name of Jane Doe. Go down here to the mailing street information, and we’ll enter in an address. For this example, we’re just going to use our Service Objects office address. We’ll put some typos in there so you can see the standardization and validation that the Service Objects web service does.
We’ll do 27 East Coat. That’s suite number 500. We’ll do Sant Barb for Santa Barbara and CA and 93101. We’ll go ahead and save the contact. You can see here that we still have the old values here, and that’s because the Salesforce doesn’t immediately call the outside APIs. It cues it up a little bit, but if we go and select Jane Doe again, we can see that now we have a standardize address here. In our DPV description, we have a message that indicates, “Yes, this record is a valid mailing address.” For this DPV score, we get a score of one. We can find the “Is Residential,” says false, meaning this is a business address. Again here, we see that the validated address, we see the USPS standardize version of the address which is 27 East Cota Street, Suite 500, as well as the validated city and zip-plus four information.
This concludes our tutorial for how to add a trigger and a class that will call out to our Service Objects web service. If you have any questions or any requests to other tutorials, please feel free to let us know at support@serviceobjects.com. We’ll be happy to accommodate.
