Apex Connector for Lightning Connect: Make Anything a Salesforce object
Agustina García Peralta Principal Developer on Platform Strategy [email protected] @agarciaodeian
About
GREAT ALONE. BETTER TOGETHER. Native to Salesforce1™ Platform since 2009
Investors include Salesforce Ventures
650+ employees, San Francisco based
3
Agenda • What is Apex Connector
• What is Lightning Connect à Demo
• Apex Connector for Lightning Connect – All in Apex
• Use Cases & Demos
• Limitations
• Take away
• Q&A
• What is Apex Connector? It is a new Framework
• Where can we use it? Lightning Connect
What is Apex Connector?
All in Apex
• Lightning Group feature
• Platform Connect, External Data Source, External Objects
• GA à Winter ‘15
• Link an External repository with your Salesforce organization
• It is not an ETL (Extract – Transform – Load)
• Data Loader, JitterBit Data Loader
What is Lightning Connect?
Use Case – For Dreaming Store
In the seventies a store opened in my neighborhood
At the beginning, it only sold
But after some time, it started selling ,
And nowadays also
• Implementing your own OData API?
• Why? When we have the Apex Connector API?
• If teh information is not exposed via HTTP API’s or is more complex to process
• You can use Java or another language to implement the ODATA API to expose any static an/or dynamic information you like!
http://www.odata.org http://odata4j.org
How is it developed?
• Apex Connector Framework
• GA à Summer ‘15
• Framework
• All in Apex!!
• How to use it?
• Class1 à Extends DataSource.Provider
• Class2 à Extends DataSource.Connection
Apex Connector for Lightning Connect
• Allow you to read information on your org and show as external object
• Create a connection to another org
Apex Connector – Anything else?
• Fields
• Double à value lose precision beyond 10 significant digits
• String à length is greater than 255, field is mapped to a long text area field
• Doesn’t provide Master – Detail
• Workaround with Indirect Lookup and External Lookup
• Subject to same limits
• Apex Governor limits
• Apex Callouts aren’t allow after DML à soft limit
Apex Connector - Limits
• Limits
• 100 external objects per org
• Doesn’t support Master – Detail
• Workaround with Indirect Lookup and External Lookup
• Read Only à for now J (safe harbor)
• Callouts à soft limit can be increased
• Customizations à usual limitations like governor limits
Lightning Connect - Limits
• Lightning Connect allows your to link information of an external repository to your org
• How to create the connection?
• OData provider
• Create your own one à OData, Java …
• Apex Connector Framework !! – All in Apex
• A Provider class
• A Connection class
• Unit Tests
• External Objects work as Custom one
• Create buttons and code behind the scene to use them
Take away as Developer
• Configuration with #clicksnotcode
• Real Time refresh
• It doesn’t count against storage limit
Take away as End User
• http://goo.gl/RQRu8y
• http://goo.gl/f4G7Rd
• http://goo.gl/Rtv4zw
Links and more
Agustina García Peralta
@agarciaodeian
www.agarciaodeian.com
http://www.meetup.com/es/Spain-Salesforce-Developer-User-Group/
HelloWorld Apex Connector code à https://goo.gl/VEEO0s