Finding Duplicates using Salesforce API from external tool

Question

Could any one guide us the best approach to find the duplicates using with own filters not salesforce Duplicate Rules.

We have pushing leads to Salesforce from external tool.We want restrict the duplicates with own filters before push to SF.

Presently, we follow the below approach.

1)Filter set up

example : (Company AND Phone)

2)Check duplicates using above filter using SOQL through REST API

Select id,name,company from Lead where company ='Salesforce.com' AND phone='1235645698';

In Our tool,We pushing bulk leads also .In this case,one API call consume for each lead to check the duplicates.

Is there any alternative approach to find the duplicates using self filters not Salesforce native duplicate management.

Answer 1

If you can't do this on Salesforce (or just don't want to) you can query using the IN keyword. So if you have, for example, three leads from different companies, you can fire the following query:

SELECT Id, Name, Company, Phone
FROM Lead
WHERE Company IN ('Company A', 'Company B', 'Company C')
AND Phone IN ('99999', '99998', '99997')

This way, you can retrieve multiple records and then flag which leads you have that you do not need to send to Salesforce.

This isn't a good approach because you will be facing two limits:

• Number of characters allowed on the request URI;
• Number of records retrieved by the API;
• Number of queries issued by your application.

So, instead of doing this filtering outside Salesforce, you should consider using Duplicate Rules on the Lead object (on Setup > Duplicate Management > Duplicate Rules), and then uploading all the unfiltered data you have (unfiltered for duplicates, that is).