Using Bulk API to import leads

Question

We are thinking to integrate salesforce with out existing website. On our website, users have already existing leads created using our lead capture form. We want to import these existing leads to users connected salesforce account. I have below questions:

1. How can we use bulk api to import these as our website will not know the password of the user and as per bulk api documentation before starting any job, user has to be logged in?

2. How can we provide a mapping functionality to map any unmapped fields of the generated leads with salesforce lead field? Is there any API for that?

Answer 1

You can use tools like the apex dataloader to create the leads with an admin/integration user that has "Set Audit Fields upon Record Creation" if you want to keep the original created date and createdby user.

When you are defining the mapping and you notice that you have fields in the source that don't have corresponding fields in salesforce that you want to see in salesforce then you need to add these fields to the lead object in salesforce.

An example mapping could look like this when created in the UI:

or when shown you look at the .sdl file:

#Mapping values
#Thu Apr 06 13:31:43 CEST 2017
owner=OwnerId
createdById=CreatedById
name=FirstName

The result will be that record will look like it was created by the user corresponding to CreatedById and the record owner will be the user whose user id matches to the OwnerId

Answer 2

We had a similar scenario, you have to be authenticated yo use the API of salesforce, but it doesn't have to be a login and password it could be a token with auto refresh obtained with oath from salesforce, the API support this kind of integration, I recommend to use a component to communicate with the API, it is posible to implement all the functions directly but with all the methods it have is difficult to do so, we use jsforce to integrate with our salesforce from our existing project, you have to search for other component more suitable if you are not comfortable with the one I suggest.

And if you want, you can check the documentation for all the apis in salesforce.

In that documentation you have an article that explain the oauth2 authentication technique and the refresh token method.

We use the jsforce component, so I'm not sure how to accomplish this in a vanilla way, I think REST API documentation could be a good start to understand the way of authentication and the different flows, it could be different for SOAP but is not going to be entirely different. In that documentation the section Understanding Authentication explain the way the different types of authentications works, I know is going to be a extensive read, I'm not entirely confortable in the Java world, but I think this repository implements a lot of the things you have to implement, could be a good start point or even use the repository as a library, I also find this other repository. Additionally there is this specific course in pluralsight that you should check out.

I hope this could help.