Designing custom REST and SOAP interfaces on Force.comSteven Herod, Technical Director (Australia), Cloud Sherpas@sherod

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Steven HerodTechnical Director, Cloud Sherpas (Australia)@sherod

Agenda• Use cases for custom interfaces• Upsides and downsides• Code walkthrough• Best Practices

3 (example) use cases• Multiple external parties need to log leads w/o duplicates

• Concern: Complex business requirements, or to understand Salesforce.

• A complex business process now needs to be exposed• Concern: Uncontrolled modification to underlying data could cause

havoc.

• Your mobile app needs to deal with a complex data model• Concern: A lot of network traffic, complex business logic

Benefits• Transaction safety – update multiple objects in a single request• Lower latency - complete many activities in a single request• Offers a narrow, service oriented, interface that allows you to

expose only the aspects of the business logic and data model that are needed.

• More robust as it can be unit tested.• A published and controlled interface specific to your business.

Caveats• Your ETL Tool may not understand custom REST/SOAP interfaces with

Salesforce.• An out of the box ‘Salesforce Adapter’ is not applicable here.

(Generic REST / SOAP should work however)• You need to write code (and test coverage)

• What was ‘no effort’ on the Salesforce side now becomes a Software Development process

• You have the request limits for you.• Request size (3MB)• SOQL query limits (100 per request)• Record modification limits(10,000 records touched)

For and against

A real life examplePublic Internet user clicks this button on a HerokuBased website or a Mobile app

Salesforce needs to do this

Class structure

Best Practices • Consciously design your API

• Think about it! Govern it! Consider every method/operation! Document it!

• Fight for the user• Think: “What is easiest for the consumer of the interface?”

• Work with the platform• Salesforce REST != REST purist• Salesforce SOAP != WS-*

• Consider how you will manage testing with external parties• Test data, test system availability…

Best practices • Use Apex Wrapper Classes as Data Transfer Objects

• Refrain from sending or expecting sObjects or you may expose a lot of internal details

• Use a Services layer• Keep your business code out of the class that handles the public interface.

• Bake in versioning• Consider if you need to make a change to your interface

• Unit test all the things• The unit test is your insurance and means you can detect when declarative

changes affect your code

Best Practices• Manage your transactions explicitly

• Especially if you do exception trapping

• Use @future if you need to.• Shorten response times where its safe to go async

• Indicate in the Apex Class’s name it’s usage as a public interface • Consider the error feedback

• What does a API consumer see if things go wrong?

• Program defensively• Expect bad input

REST Specific query advice• 1 Class per URL mapping = proliferation• Don’t forget the Query String

• E.g. GET /LoanApplications/?daysSinceUpdate=5

• Watch your status codes and verbs!• Use the right status code and the right verb (GET, PUT, POST)