I have searched long and hard for this issue and can not seem to find a very good example. Although, I have found some interesting hacks and alternatives.

Here are my requirements:

• Use the Salesforce Reports to extract data and provide column mappings into an external application.

Therefore I have broken up the development process into 3 areas.

1) Allow the selection of the report that will be used for the exporting Salesforce Data.

2) Allow the selection of salesforce report columns that will map into the external application.

3) Pull the data from the report and import it into the external application.

Current Findings:

- Development areas 1 & 2 are easily accomplished through the Enterprise and Metadata API's, even the Partner API can be used here.

- Development area 3 functionality is not provided through the API, but can be accomplished through some URL hacks and creating a Cookie that contains SessionHeaderID information that is provided from the API login.

Problems:

- This isn't a very stable solution, if we are dealing with large files, there is the possibility of timeouts occuring during file download of the data, using xmlHTTPRequest's.

- Using the Salesforce Reports would have been very beneficial, due to the fact that the results can be filtered properly. And, I wouldn't have to build my own results filtering engine.

Questions:

 - Am I taking the correct approach? I am looking at downloading contact information, which can be done through Campaign, Lead and Contact objects. And these objects are available through the API.

Any further suggestions or guidance would be very much appreciated.

    Thanks,

Sunster