Products.salesforcebaseconnector 1.0alpha3

Salesforce Base Connector

Product home is http://plone.org/products/salesforcebaseconnector. A documentation area and issue tracker are available at the linked locations.

A Google Group, called Plone Salesforce Integration exists with the sole aim of discussing and developing tools to make Plone integrate well with Salesforce.com. If you have a question, joining this group and posting to the mailing list is the likely best way to get support.

Failing that, please try using the Plone users’ mailing list or the #plone irc channel for support requests. If you are unable to get your questions answered there, or are interested in helping develop the product, see the credits below for individuals you might contact.

Overview

The Salesforce Base Connector product provides a Zope-aware tool for interacting with the Python-based Beatbox Salesforce client and for storing username and password information for connecting to a Salesforce.com instance.

Rationale For This Product

Salesforce.com provides an extensible, powerful platform from which to do Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tasks ranging from sales, marketing, nonprofit constituent organizing, and customer service.

Beatbox is a Python wrapper to the Salesforce.com API (version 7.0), and provides the underpinnings for this product, but suffers from several limitations from within the Zope/Plone integrator space.

Salesforce Base Connector aims to augment Beatbox for Zope/Plone developers, providing a convenient and cleanly integrated set of features:

• Managing Salesforce credentials

• Managing http connections to Salesforce

• Managing Zope permissions over view and edit actions against Salesforce

• Providing an interface to the Salesforce API from within protected python, for example, in Python Script objects and Zope Page Templates

Additionally, Salesforce Base Connector is intended to decouple Zope/Plone development projects from the specific Python toolkit used as the interface to Salesforce. If a more current alternative to Beatbox comes onto the scene, Salesforce Base Connector can be updated to use this code base as its underlying framework.

Salesforce Base Connector is intended to be used as the foundational piece for your own Plone/Salesforce applications.

Dependencies

Depends upon the Beatbox library, which is a Python wrapper to the Salesforce.com API (version 7.0).

To download and install beatbox, please visit:

http://code.google.com/p/salesforce-beatbox/

Installation

Known Problems

See TODO.txt

Credits

The Plone & Salesforce crew in Seattle and Portland:

• Jon Baldivieso <jonb –AT– onenw –DOT– org>

• Andrew Burkhalter <andrewb –AT– onenw –DOT– org>

• Brian Gershon <briang –AT– webcollective –DOT– coop>

• David Glick <davidglick –AT– onenw –DOT– org>

• Jesse Snyder <jesses –AT– npowerseattle –DOT– org>

Jesse Snyder and NPower Seattle for the foundation of code that has become Salesforce Base Connector

Simon Fell for providing the beatbox Python wrapper to the Salesforce.com API

Salesforce.com Foundation and Enfold Systems for their gift and work on beatbox (see: http://gokubi.com/archives/onenorthwest-gets-grant-from-salesforcecom-to-integrate-with-plone)

See the CHANGES.txt file for the growing list of people who helped with particular features or bugs.

License

Distributed under the GPL.

See LICENSE.txt and LICENSE.GPL for details.

Running Tests

To run tests in a unix-like environment, do the following:

$ cd $INSTANCE/Products/salesforcebaseconnector/tests
$ cp sfconfig.py.in sfconfig.py
Then edit sfconfig.py with your Salesforce.com USERNAME and PASSWORD
$ cd $INSTANCE
$ ./bin/zopectl test -s Products.salesforcebaseconnector

FAQ about running tests

If you see an error message like the following and you’re certain your login/password combination IS valid:

SoapFaultError: 'INVALID_LOGIN' 'INVALID_LOGIN: Invalid username or password or locked out.'

You’re likely running into one of several security measures in effect at Salesforce.com. You can do one of the following.

Setup your security token within your Salesforce instance and append it to your password To do so, following these instructions:

1. Log into your Salesforce.com instance

2. Click Setup

3. My Personal information

4. Reset My Security Token

5. edit sfconfig.py to have “mypassword[token]” (where [token] is your security token)

Whitelist your IP address

This can be done at the following:

1. Log into your Salesforce.com instance

2. Click Setup

3. Security Controls

4. Network Access

The latter option may be preferable in a production environment, since the security token is more likely to change over time with password updates. For testing, either is fine.

You can find the needed background at http://www.salesforce.com/security/

Often tests can fail if one has aborted the running of the tests midstream, thus bypassing the cleanup (i.e. removing fake contacts) that happens after each individual test is run. If you encounter incorrect assertions about the numbers of contacts in your Salesforce instance, try searching for and cleaning up dummy John and Jane Doe contacts.