Data Integration

Integration refers to the incorporation of the database into the rest of your application, the business logic, and the user interface. If your application consists solely of stored procedures, there is no integration; your code runs inside the database process and hits database objects directly. More commonly, there are application servers that need to communicate with the database.

With Force.com, either you are coding “on the platform,” which is akin to writing stored procedures, or you are developing a “composite application,” which executes somewhere else but integrates with Force.com data and logic. The following subsections describe how integrating data in Force.com differs from traditional Web application development.

With Force.com, the ORM layer is built in to the platform. Data objects, metadata objects, and queries have direct representation in Apex code. When you create a new custom object, it’s immediately accessible by name in Apex code. If you accidentally mistype the name of a field in your new object, your code will not compile.

For example, the snippet of Apex code in Listing 2.7 selects a single record from the Resource object, updates the value of its Hourly Cost Rate field, and commits the updated record to the database.

Listing 2.7 Apex Code Snippet

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public void grantRaise(String resourceName, Decimal newRate) {
  Resource__c r = [ select Id, Hourly_Cost_Rate__c
      from Resource__c
      where Name = :resourceName limit 1 ];
  if (r != null) {
    r.Hourly_Cost_Rate__c = newRate;
    update r;
  }
}

Note the use of an in-line SOQL query (in square brackets), the custom object as a first-class object in code (Resource__c), and in-line data manipulation (update statement).

Listing 2.8 Metadata XML for a Custom Object

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<CustomObject xmlns="http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata">
    <deploymentStatus>Deployed</deploymentStatus>
    <fields>
        <fullName>Start_Date__c</fullName>
        <label>Start Date</label>
        <type>Date</type>
    </fields>
    <label>Project</label>
    <nameField>
        <label>Project Name</label>
        <type>Text</type>
    </nameField>
    <pluralLabel>Projects</pluralLabel>
    <searchLayouts/>
    <sharingModel>ReadWrite</sharingModel>
</CustomObject>

This XML describes an object with a human-readable name of Project. It contains a single custom field called Start Date, of type Date. The Sharing Model of ReadWrite means that all users in the organization can edit the records in the Project object. Force.com provides a Metadata API for importing metadata XML into the platform. This is how development tools such as the Force.com IDE operate.

Force.com’s native user interface is tightly integrated with your data model. The definitions of your objects, fields, and relationships are combined with additional configuration settings to create full-featured user interfaces that can perform create, read, update, delete (CRUD) operations on your data. Note that the concept of CRUD is also referred to as read, create, edit, delete (RCED) in the Salesforce world.