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Interact with the external data using External Objects in Salesforce

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Imagine your company just implemented Salesforce and uses data from multiple external sources to power the CRM In such a case, employees often switch from Salesforce to other external sources, due to which their productivity takes a severe hit

This can be a story for many Salesforce users who face a horrid time switching between Salesforce and external applications So, the question here is how you can resolve this problem

That’s exactly where External Objects and Salesforce Connect shine

Using external objects through Salesforce Connect helps users access external data from within Salesforce, thus saving them from switching between multiple applications As a Salesforce consulting 몭rm, we’ve helped many clients save work hours by accessing their external data within Salesforce.

Let’s better understand how exactly you can access your external applications within Salesforce, starting with learning about Salesforce Connect and external objects.

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What is Salesforce Connect?

Salesforce Connect is a highly reliable and robust App Cloud integration service It enables Salesforce users to seamlessly access and manage data stored in external data sources without leaving the Salesforce native environment

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What are External Objects?

External data sources have respective external objects used by the Lightning platform for interacting with the external data.

External objects are like the custom objects in Salesforce. But the difference here is that the external object record data is stored outside your Org The data could be stored in external systems like SAP, Oracle, Heroku Postgres, etc.

Each external object is related to an external data source definition in your Salesforce org. An external data source specifies how Salesforce users access an external system It is important to note that each Org can have up to 100 external objects

Ways to Link Salesforce Connect with External Applications

We’ve mentioned here different data adapters that you can use to establish a connection between an external data source and Salesforce Connect:

1. Open Data Protocol (OData): OData is a highly used REST based protocol for integrating data You can link data sources to Salesforce Connect, exposed by OData 2.0 or 4.0 producers.

2. Custom­developed adapters: Salesforce users can also consider easy­to­use adapters in Apex to link APIs that are not in the OData format These are tailor made adapters that can easily connect with any web API You can use these adapters to link to thousands of publicly available APIs.

3. Salesforce Connector: This adapter is ideal for using multiple Salesforce instances Salesforce Connector is very user friendly and can connect external applications without coding anything.

Relationships between data objects in the external source and Salesforce

There are three types of relationships that you can establish between the external data objects and their counterparts in your Salesforce data system: Lookup

The possible parent child data object relationships are shown in the image below

Now, let’s dive into the steps you should follow to set up Salesforce Connect to access external data.

6. Select Type as Lightning Connect: OData 2.0.

7. Enter https://orderdb.herokuapp.com/orders.svc/ as the URL.

8. Leave the remaining with their respective default values. Click Save.

With this, you’ve configured an external data source Now you can select the tables you wish to integrate into your Salesforce org.

Step 2: Create External Objects

1. Click Develop > External Data Sources and then click the OrderDB external data source if you are not already on the OrderDB external data source page after you’ve completed the previous steps.

database. Lightning Connect created a set of custom fields just as you would create for a custom object.

The key differences between an external object and a custom object are:

The API names of an external object have the suffix x instead of c

External objects have different standard fields

External objects have a reference to their external data source along with a table within that source.

6. Click Next.

7 Click Next This will allow you to accept the default tab visibility settings

8. Click the checkbox Include Tab to deselect all the apps. 9. Select the checkbox External Orders. 10. Click Save. Step 5: View the External Order Data

1. If the app menu is not showing External Orders already, click the app menu and select it 2. Click Orders. 3. Click Go.

Lightning Connect retrieved order IDs from the sample order database for the first 25 order records

4. Click any one of the order external ID values.

Lightning Connect retrieved the fields for selected orders

You can directly go to the steps to set up Salesforce Connect using this PDF on How to Set Up Salesforce Connect. →

Summary

Creating external objects and working with Salesforce Connect is a very convenient way for users to access and handle data from external sources in the native Salesforce environment without any hassle.

The steps in the given PDF will help to supercharge your user’s productivity by eliminating the struggle of switching between multiple systems. But if you need any help with that, our Salesforce consultants will always be there to assist you.