After several weeks of work, I can announce my first concrete success: the download of the contact list from the CRM to a CSV file.
On supported platforms, like Java or C#, salesforce.com offers libraries for a convenient access to their APIs (webservice interfaces). For Objective-C and GNUstep of course there is nothing of the kind. Thus I started writing a layer to access the webservices directly using SOAP calls. To be able to write those, I use GNUstep's WebServices framework, which I discovered was still quite rough and incomplete. Richard Frith-MacDonald though promptly debugged it and extended it. Until the first login was possible, a lot of debugging and investigation on the calls was necessary, I was patiently supported by my colleague Andrea Rosa.
Currently the donload means that the Login method completes correctly and returns a valid session, which is then reused to perform the query request and interpret its response. It is a demonstration that the whole concept can work
My intention is to develop DataBasin to be a free Open Source alternative to the DataLoader tool supplied by salesforce.com. Once I reach that goal, I alreayd have further ideas on how to extend it.
DataBasin is part of the GNUstep Application Project and will be released there once ready for prime time.
Congratulations on the result and to the determination to get it, I hope this is the first step for creating an usefull application
ReplyDelete