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kashifkashif 

Displaying Salesforce info on company website

Our company recently started using Salesforce.  Can someone please give me some advice on how to accomplish the following:

We would like the 'Careers' page of our company website to use the data entered in Salesforce. Whenever someone enters a new Recruiting Opportunity in Salesforce, and they have checked the checkbox that says 'Post on Jobs Website', we want that job to appear on our company website.

What is the best way to do this? Is there a way to post the job opening to the company website when someone clicks 'Save' in Salesforce? Or will I have to go some other route--like an interface on company website that you have to log in to pull the data out of Salesforce, or a nightly process that does this?

FYI, the company web server is running MS Windows 2003 Server.

I am new to Salesforce and would appreciate any help/code samples/tutorial links that you guys can provide.

Thanks!
Gareth DaviesGareth Davies

How do you put the infor on your web site now? Is it drawn from a MySQL DataBase or similar?

There are two scenarios that I would consider - one simpler than the other.

The complex (but elegant) version would drive the content live out of SFDC by you writing a web-service to generate an XML feed and then format that to the website using a style sheet.

The, possibly, simpler solution is to periodically run a process to extract the changed information from SFDC and then store that within your web system - i.e. MySQL, a flatfile, SQL-Server or whatever you do now.

You can write the process for doing this in pretty much anything these days including perl, php, python if you come at these problems that way or, what we would do, which is write a "service" using visual studio .net.

There are plenty of examples of extracting data available  - have a look at the toolkit downloads . Remember that you will need to store a username and password, so look into encryption for those and I suggest using an account which has read-only access to the areas that are required and nowhere else.

Good luck.

Gareth.

Message Edited by Gareth Davies on 03-08-2006 12:33 AM
kashifkashif
Thanks for your reply. Yes, the idea for now is to drive the content 'live' out of Salesforce when someone goes to the 'Careers' page.
I have downloaded the toolkits and I am looking into using the samples provided in .NET toolkit to get started.

Thanks again for your help. Any more suggestions/ideas are welcome.
mtayyabchmtayyabch
The API samples on SalesForce site use the API calls using a SOAP web service. I have recently done it. I had the same problem at the start as I knew nothing about salesforce at all. I strongly suggest you that instead of testing and developing on live system of your company, you sholud subscribe for a 30 days trial of salesforce enviroment in which you will be given the administrative rights of the salesforce. This will help you a lot to understand the salesforce objects and to avoid any real data loss. I have done the same and have developed a parallel customized CRM system to be deployed on our client's website for viewing and inserting data on salesforce. Go to http://www.salesforce.com/developer/orderEntry/signup.jsp  and get signed-up. Give a valid email address as login because on this email, your password will be sent to you.
Secondly get the vb.net / C# sample API from SalesForce site. Get the API with maximum options. It is windows based. From that get the login code. In the login name and password, give the login and password of your 30 day trial version. The sample API project also contains the code for data retreival and insertion. This will give you a quick start.
  I am asking you to obtain the trial version because your company will not have to subscribe for SalesForce API licence during that time. If you do not get the trial version, and your company has not already subscribed for API licence, your API calls will never work.
  Study  the pdf file with the sample project code. It will solve many problems. Tell me if you have any other query.
 
Tayyab
 
 
kashifkashif
Thanks for your reply. Did you use C# in your application?

I had already made a developer Salesforce account for testing purposes. I downloaded all the samples and toolkits. I am using C# and ASP.NET to display the 'Opportunities' from Salesforce onto our company website. I looked at the web2lead sample provided in the ASP.NET toolkit. I have been able to use the same idea to establish the connection with Salesforce (since we don't want to require people to enter a username and password to access the data on the company website).

But I am having problems getting the data and displaying it on a web page. The main problems is how do you debug such an application? I mean if I have breakpoints or Console.WriteLines in my .cs file, that doesn't help because they are never hit when someone accesses the web page. I am sure there is an easy way of doing this--but like I said I am new to .NET and Salesforce. Do you have any code samples that you can share that retrieve the data from Salesforce and display it on a web page?

Once again, thank you for your help.
SuperfellSuperfell
Using the .NET debugger (either the freebie from the SDK or Visual Studio) you can attach to the ASP.NET worker process, set breakpoints, set through your ASP.NET code etc.
kashifkashif
Thanks. I followed your advice and was able to get the debugging to work.

However, when I access the web page, the breakpoint in the code in Visual Studio turns from a red dot to a yellow warning symbol and when I bring my mouse over it, it says:
'The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document.'

I have made sure that:
1) debug is set to 'true' in web.config
2) The configuration for the project is set to 'Debug' mode in Visual Studio
3) In IIS, in the properties of the website, 'Enable ASP server-side script debugging' and 'Enable ASP client-side script debugging' is checked.

Is there anything else that I am missing that would cause the no symbols loaded error?