Tutorial - Getting Started with Rails & Databasedotcom Gem

2012-01-28T05:07:00.000-08:00

It the new year again and time for resolutions. I made a resolution about a year ago to learn ruby. If you are looking for something to learn this year I would recommend ruby and here’s why:

Salesforce.com bought Heroku for $220M
Salesforce.com has been pushing “Open. Social. Mobile” for quite some time.
Ruby is great for creating social and mobile apps with open source technologies.

Do you see a correlation here? There are big things ahead for Force.com developers using Heroku. Eventhough Heroku is a polyglot platform, it shines with ruby. If you have the time, add ruby to your toolbox.

I presented this topic today at our Appirio Continuing Education webinar and thought it might come in handy for others trying to learn ruby. In the video I use the Databasedotcom gem to build a small app that displays a list of accounts, the details for a selected account and then queries for accounts by keyword. I reference some links to help you get started with ruby and rails and I’ve added them after the video.

You can find the source code here.

Links Referenced in the Video

Railsnstaller (Windows)
Homebrew
Ruby Version Manager (RVM)

Rails Guides
Railscasts
Rails for Zombies
Code School
Try Ruby
Ruby on Rails Tutorial
Ruby on Rails Documentation

Databasedotcom gem
Building and Deploying Great Applications with Salesforce, Ruby, and Heroku (Dreamforce)

Make Any Salesforce sObject REST-enabled

2011-09-30T09:20:00.000-07:00

One of our #awesome guys, George Acker, created this nifty process to REST-enable any sObject in salesforce.com.

It's a little hard to watch in this small window. You might want to view it full screen here.

Unable to display content. Adobe Flash is required.

Demo App - Ruby, Rails & Force.com REST API on Heroku

2011-06-03T03:47:00.000-07:00

So continuing with my learning Ruby series, I finally finished my sample app using the Force.com REST API. I ran into a few issues and fortunately Quinton Wall and Heroku support came to my rescue. Apparently require 'Accounts' and require 'accounts' aren't the same when running on Heroku. Go figure.

This is a demo Rails app running on Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.0.5 hosted on Heroku. It uses OAuth2 via OmniAuth to authorize access to a salesforce.com org. It uses the Force.com REST API to query for records, retreive records to display, create new records and update existing ones. It should be good sample app to get noobs (like me) up and running.

I forked Quinton Wall's (excellent) omniauth-rails3-forcedotcom project to get started. One of the things you have to do when using the Force.com REST API is to configure your server to run under SSL using WEBrick. I found some excellent instruction for OS X here.

You can run the app for yourself here.

All of the code for this app is hosted at github so feel free to fork it. I've pulled out some of the more important parts of the app for discussion after the video.

app/controllers/accounts_controller.rb

The account controller delegates authority to accounts.rb for integration with Force.com and then packages up the returns for the views.

require 'accounts'

class AccountsController < ApplicationController
  def index
  end
  
  def search
    @json = Accounts.search(params[:accountName])
  end
  
  def show
    @account = Accounts.retrieve(params[:id])
    @opportunities = Accounts.opportunities(params[:id])    
  end
  
  def create
     @account = Accounts.create
  end
  
  def edit
     @account = Accounts.retrieve(params[:id])
  end
  
  def save
    Accounts.save(params)
    redirect_to :action => :show, :id => params[:id]
  end  
  
  def new_opp 
    @account = Accounts.retrieve(params[:id])
  end
  
  def save_opp
    Accounts.create_opp(params)
    redirect_to :action => :show, :id => params[:id]
  end

end

lib/accounts.rb

Accounts.rb does most of the heavy lifting for the app. It prepares the requests to Force.com with the correct headers and makes the actual calls to Force.com with the REST API.

require 'rubygems'
require 'httparty'

class Accounts
  include HTTParty
  #doesn't seem to pick up env variable correctly if I set it here
  #headers 'Authorization' => "OAuth #{ENV['sfdc_token']}"
  format :json
  # debug_output $stderr

  def self.set_headers
    headers 'Authorization' => "OAuth #{ENV['sfdc_token']}"
  end

  def self.root_url
    @root_url = ENV['sfdc_instance_url']+"/services/data/v"+ENV['sfdc_api_version']
  end
  
  def self.search(keyword)
    Accounts.set_headers
    soql = "SELECT Id, Name, BillingCity, BillingState, Phone from Account Where Name = \'#{keyword}\'"
    get(Accounts.root_url+"/query/?q=#{CGI::escape(soql)}")
  end
  
  def self.create()
    Accounts.set_headers
    headers 'Content-Type' => "application/json"
    
    options = {
      :body => {
          :Name => "1234"
      }.to_json
    }
    response = post(Accounts.root_url+"/sobjects/Account/", options)
    # puts response.body, response.code, response.message
  end
  
  def self.save(params)
    Accounts.set_headers
    headers 'Content-Type' => "application/json"
    
    options = {
      :body => {
          :billingcity => params[:BillingCity]
      }.to_json
    }
    p options
    response = post(Accounts.root_url+"/sobjects/Account/#{params[:id]}?_HttpMethod=PATCH", options)
    # 201 response.body equals success
    # puts response.body, response.code, response.message
  end
  
  def self.retrieve(id)
    Accounts.set_headers
    get(Accounts.root_url+"/sobjects/Account/#{id}?fields=Id,Name,BillingCity,BillingState,Phone,Website") 
  end
  
  def self.opportunities(accountId)
    Accounts.set_headers
    soql = "SELECT Id, Name, Amount, StageName, Probability, CloseDate from Opportunity where AccountId = \'#{accountId}\'"
    get(Accounts.root_url+"/query/?q=#{CGI::escape(soql)}")
  end
  
  def self.create_opp(params)
    Accounts.set_headers
    headers 'Content-Type' => "application/json"
    
    options = {
      :body => {
          :name => params[:name],
          :amount => params[:amount],
          :accountId => params[:id],
          :amount => params[:amount],
          :closeDate => params[:closeDate],
          :stageName => params[:stageName]
      }.to_json
    }
    response = post(Accounts.root_url+"/sobjects/Opportunity/", options)
    # 201 response.body equals success
    # puts response.body, response.code, response.message
  end
 
end

Appirio Tech Blog

Tutorial - Getting Started with Rails & Databasedotcom Gem

Make Any Salesforce sObject REST-enabled

Demo App - Ruby, Rails & Force.com REST API on Heroku