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Tom SimmonsTom Simmons 

Help with webservices

Dear all, I need help with getting started with Webservices. We have a customer who would like to integrate their webservices in Salesforce. Webservices return XML format and customer would like to push data to Salesforce on daily basis (Approx 10,00 to 15,000 records daily). How can we acheive this?
  1. Will I need a WSDL document generated for customer`s webservices to get started and consume the webserivces? If yes, can someone please suggest me standard practices (maybe step by step) and give me a sample code to make daily callouts.
  2. Does all Webservices support JSON or does that depend upon type of Webservices we are interacting with?
Since I`m new to Webservices, any help is much appricated. 
 
Best Answer chosen by Tom Simmons
NagendraNagendra (Salesforce Developers) 
Hi Tom,

This is likely to get closed for being too broad but here are a couple of thoughts that might help you...

Web services are really just data transmitted in text form using the HTTP protocol. The text transmitted used to be XML and a big set of standards including XML Schema and WSDL were employed, with complex toolsets to consume those and generate code from them. Salesforce's WSDL to Apex tooling can only handle a restricted subset of what those standards allow. Given the choice now, most of us would choose to instead transmit JSON data because that is a much simpler encoding (and so encourages simpler design) and tools are much less of a problem. JSON support in Apex is pretty good.

So one conversation to have with your customer is to check if they can offer JSON. If they can I'd try working with that first and only go the WSDL route if they can't support JSON or some requirement comes up that makes it necessary.

Please mark this as solved if it helps.

Best Regards,
Nagendra.P