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monsterdustinmonsterdustin 

Database.com right for us?

We're an enterprise SF account holder and think we've hit a road block with limitations of the SF API.

 

We need to be able to, every 15 minutes, make a call to PayPal's API and retreive purchase history (outgoing payments). Because of the nature of PayPal's API, we must do a search for all transactions within a given time period and then make another seperate call for any transactions that were found to complete the record with information that we require. After this is done, we want to use the eBay API to bring in some more specific information about the eBay listing and link it all up to a purchase record within SF.

 

The limitation comes where the visualforce trigger is only able to create a call out every hour. For starters, this just doesnt work for us as far as speed. On the second hand, PayPal only will retreive the last 100 transactions and in a given hour, we might exceed this creating a spirling backlog of request as we grow.

 

Likewise, the API limits for SF seem to be a bit low. 1,000 per User. We upgraded to 10,000 for our data entry through forms.

 

In anycase, our idea now is basically to use a MySQL online DB and use a PHP script to temporarly store PayPal/eBay information and then use the SF API to send the information into SF and create the record that we need.

 

Before we do this, I wanted to check to see if Database.com might be able to assist in the road blocks that we've seen so far.

 

Thanks in advance!

jucuzoglujucuzoglu

Have you thought about using the APEX Scheduler. It can run approximately every 15min if desired. You can take the information that is returned from your API calls and store them in some sort of holding object. Independently you can also run a batch process periodically to search through unprocessed API data from the calls and process the information.

 

API callouts should not be a big limting factor. If you make a call to 2 services (Paypal/Ebay) 4 times an hour your still only looking at 192 callouts for the API user.

 

 
monsterdustinmonsterdustin

How do you schedule every 15 minutes? It seems can only do every hour. And at that, it's for the entire organization limit.

 

We need to call out every 5-15 minutes and get transactions, then like you suggested, store the information and then make additional call outs based on new records to retreive additional information through another API.

 

We've thought of just creating an outside MySQL database and creating the DB here and then using a connector to push the information to SF.

 

The API limits are not the problem, it's the Apex Scheduling that's an issue.