Dynamically Mapping Fields from Salesforce Query Activity Output

-
While I was working on Salesforce.com integration, the TIBCO BusinessWorks plug-in provides a "Query All" and "Retrieve All" activities to query Salesforce objects. The "Query All" lets you use a SOQL statement freely, while "Retrieve All" only allows you to specify the list of fields and optionally the object IDs. The only filter you can use for the latter are the object IDs, which doesn't seem to be the case most of the time. Both activities have a generic output and are not specific to a particular Salesforce object. It has an "any element" field which you can coerce based on a specified schema and you would need a WSDL file generated from Salesforce to do this. However, the problem starts when Salesforce keeps on updating the WSDL at the same time, so you will need to map the newly added field all the time! The solution I have come up with for this dilemma was not actually quite that simple but it offers more flexibility in the code.

You would notice that the XPath expression for retrieving a particular field always starts with //result/records/. These two nodes contain a particular namespace. You can override namespaces by using the local-name() function such as the following (for instance you want to get the ContactId):

//*[local-name()='result']/*[local-name()='records']/*[local-name()='ContactId']

Even though the WSDL file is not updated, you can still retrieve the ContactId field. That means, you won't need the updated WSDL file at all!

This would be more useful if you want to implement dynamic evaluation of XPath expressions. You can write a Java custom function to do this. It could be the usual Java code. In TIBCO BW, I don't think we have yet dynamic evaluation of an XPath expression. So, in the Java method, you can pass the XPath formula and the XML string which the XPath formula will be evaluated against. I've tried this and it doesn't really slow down performance.

XPath xPath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
xPath.evaluate(xPathExpression, new InputSource(new SringReader(...));

You can create a static XML file where you can specify all the fields you need to retrieve. You can also use this XML file to dynamically build the SOQL statement. You can iterate through the list of Salesforce fields without mapping them one by one; most especially useful if you would need to render a generic canonical XML that uses a simple "field-value pair" schema.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

XML Schema and JSON Schema Validation in Mule 4

-
Image
Exposing an API to be consumed by client applications entails a lot of challenges. Apart from a good API definition and documentation, you also need to ensure that the request payload submitted to your API endpoints are valid and conforms to the expected data structure. Although it is not required, I think some of the advantages to validate a request payload are: Establish a service contract which is a form of agreement between the service provider and the service consumer. This means that, in order to successfully consume an API, a client application needs to strictly follow a specification "for the request payload" called a data schema . Establish data integrity which ensures that all incoming data submitted to the API are "in a format that is expected". It doesn't make sense to process malformed data. For instance, if you are inserting data to a relational database, it would be more beneficial to first check mandatory (or required) fields before processing th
Read more

Parsing a JSON String and Converting it to XML in TIBCO

-
Image
If you have the REST & JSON Plug-in for TIBCO BusinessWorks, parsing and rendering a JSON string into XML is a straightforward task. We are often using XML in TIBCO, because XML is the most common format that is used to transform data using XSLT and XPath language. There are two ways we can parse and render JSON text: using an XML Schema, and using Java classes. Of course, XML Schema is already very handy, as we can always easily create one in TIBCO Designer. But, before we go to why we need to use Java classes, we need to examine first the nature of an XML Schema. An XSD describes the XML document in a strictly structured manner, which means that the sequence and nesting of the elements are important. However, for JSON, we cannot rely on the order of the elements, and we cannot force JSON to be that way. It’s just its character, and it maintains itself as an unordered collection of zero or more name/value pairs. That said, we cannot expect a JSON message to conform to the sp
Read more

Using XML To Java in TIBCO BW

-
Image
There are cases when it is preferable to use Java code instead of XSLT when doing a complex string manipulation. For example, you would like to produce a single string from the different segments of an XML. You can do this by using XML To Java activity in TIBCO. Suppose you have the following XML: <?xml version = "1.0" encoding = "UTF-8"?> <Employees xmlns = "http://xmlns.tibco.com/javaschema/javaschema.Employees"> <Employee> <Age>24</Age> <Level>2</Level> <Name>Mark Cruz</Name> <Role>Technology Consultant</Role> <Skill>Java</Skill> <Skill>TIBCO</Skill> <Skill>Ruby</Skill> </Employee> <Employee> <Age>25</Age> <Level>1</Level> <Name>John Cruz</Name> <Role>Technology Consultant</Role> <Skill>TIBCO BW</Skill> <Skill>PHP</Skill>
Read more