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Samigold
Need help with integration
Hi,
Below is my business case
We have clients in Salesforce.com The financial transactions related to these clients are available in an external system.
I would like to know if we can dynamically access the financial data from the external system through an API and display the same in Salesforce.com without the need for replicating the data in Salesforce.com.
If yes please let me know how this can be achieved.
This may be a very basic question, being a newbie I would need your assistance.
Thanks in advance
It's certainly possible. We are doing this to look up clients in our legacy systems. You will need a web service on your external financial system, then import that WSDL into Salesforce to create a stub which you can call from Apex.
Now for the hard part. You'll probably want the call to be secure so you will need a third party certificate from a company like VeriSign. Install that certificate on the web server (or load balancer) providing the service. You will also want to configure your firewall to let in calls from Salesforce on port 443 (HTTPS).
Keep in mind that the responses from outbound web service calls are limited to 100kb.
Talk to your security team and network administrators about the requirements they have around allowing calls into your network.
Good luck!
Just to state the less difficult case, if the external system has a parameterized web based interface that displays the information, then you don't need to go to that level of integration, you could merely use weblinks and pass the appropriate lookup parameters to your transaction system and display the results in an iframe in the Salesforce pages.
No coding required, but of course if it's a no-ui database, or some other closed transactional system, then yes, you would need to move the data yourself.
Best, Steve.