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Using Salesforce Search in Mule 4

GitHub repository with the Mule project can be found at the end of the post.



One of the most used actions when we work with Salesforce integrations is the use of query. It allows us to pull information from any table, do some subqueries, and pull relationship data. But there’s one action we, as developers, don’t use very often (sometimes we don’t even know this operation is available for us) and it is the Salesforce Object Search Language (SOSL).



SOSL and SOQL


Based on the Force.com Developer documentation:


A SOQL query is the equivalent of a SELECT SQL statement and searches the org database. SOSL is a programmatic way of performing a text-based search against the search index.


Whether you use SOQL or SOSL depends on whether you know which objects or fields you want to search, plus other considerations.


Use SOQL when you know which objects the data resides in, and you want to:

  • Retrieve data from a single object or from multiple objects that are related to one another.

  • Count the number of records that meet specified criteria.

  • Sort results as part of the query.

  • Retrieve data from number, date, or checkbox fields.


Use SOSL when you don’t know which object or field the data resides in, and you want to:

  • Retrieve data for a specific term that you know exists within a field. Because SOSL can tokenize multiple terms within a field and build a search index from this, SOSL searches are faster and can return more relevant results.

  • Retrieve multiple objects and fields efficiently where the objects might or might not be related to one another.

  • Retrieve data for a particular division in an organization using the divisions feature.

  • Retrieve data that’s in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Thai. Morphological tokenization for CJKT terms helps ensure accurate results.


Here are some differences between SOSL and SOQL.



You might be asking yourself how this is helpful and how you can use it. Well, let’s think of a scenario.



Scenario


The general idea is to be able to process User information coming from any source and use the information to be able to validate if a Contact or Lead already exists in the platform using a specific external Id field. Based on the result we should be able to update a Contact / Lead or create a brand new Lead record.


user information external id campaign external id search contacts or leads based on their external id does user exist as contact yes update information no does user exist as lead create new lead


Implementation


I will create a pretty simple application to demonstrate how we can accomplish this. The Mule application would be created in Mule 4 and I will set a few records in a DataWeave component to simulate the input payload.



input-data-flow

input data flow scheduler logger transform message incoming user information original payload transform message preparing search request flow reference dataweave mule 4 flow

This flow contains a scheduler to manually trigger the integration for demonstration purposes. Then we set the incoming payload in a DataWeave component just like this:



There’s a variable called “originalPayload”, which will be used to filter the information out once we get Salesforce information.


In the next DW component (Preparing Search Request) we just convert all the external Id values from the original response to a plain string value concatenated by OR, making this an understandable payload value for the Salesforce search. The code looks like this:


%dw 2.0
output application/java
---
(payload map {
  ids: "\"" ++ ($.id) ++ "\"" 
}.ids) joinBy " OR "


salesforce-search-flow