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jwhjwh 

Newbie: Integration with other web applications

Our company is currently evaluating Salesforce.com and one of the things I've been asked to investigate is how to integrate Salesforce.com into some of our internal corporate web applications. For example, from Salesforce.com we might provide a link to an internal web application. This web application may itself use the sforce.api to update information on salesforce.com.

One of the issues I'm interested in is how best to handle user authentication. What we want to be able to do is to limit the number of login prompts that our user would see. If, for example, the user logged in at Salesforce.com, we would like our application to know this fact and not prompt for an additional password. If our application calls back to the sforce api we would like to the code to run as the user who logged in to Salesforce.com.

What options are available to us to make this sort of thing happen?

Is there a way to put a session key in the URL which invokes our application in such a way that our internal application can make use of that session key when accessing the sforce api?

Any thoughts on this subject would be appreciated.

Thanks
adamgadamg
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Is there a way to put a session key in the URL which invokes our application in such a way that our internal application can make use of that session key when accessing the sforce api?
>>
 
This is exactly what you want to do, and farily easily accomplished; the session id that will be generated by salesforce after login, and passed to your applicaiton in the Web Integration Link, is the same session id that is used in the API context.
 
When you create you WIL via the administrative setup area, you can specify which fields to pass in the URL, including session id. 
 
Adam
jwhjwh
Ok, this makes sense. I'm having one problem, however. I want to be able to make sforce api calls back into salesforce.com. I have the session id, but how do I know which server to talk to? I'm accessing a Java servlet.

Thanks.
DevAngelDevAngel

Hi jwh,

When you configure the link from salesforce.com you are provided with a selection of merge fields that can be used in the contstruction of url as a query string on the url.  Among other things, the server url is available as well.  This will allow you to construct a link like:

http://www.foo.bar/default.htm?id={!Contact_ID}&last={!Contact_LastName}&first={!Contact_FirstName}&type=contact&method=GoDogGo&server={!API_Enterprise_Server_URL}&sessionID={!API_Session_ID}

Cheers 

 

RuudRuud

i have been given the same task for my company....how did you manage to do it?