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I am building an integration between my company's Drupal CMS and our SFDC CRM. I will be using the SFDC SOAP API to accomplish this.

The idea is to do a query via the soap API every time a user logs into our Drupal web site and check for status' set in a corresponding contact record in sales force. This status will in a sense provide an access permission that I want to grant in my Drupal CMS.

My question is this, if I rely upon this Soap API to provide these permssions, will I run into a max allowed API calls via the Soap client?

Does Salesforce monitor the amount of Soap API calls I make in a given month, week, day?

Will they cut the access after a certain amount?

Bare in mind that my company pays for Enterprise SFDC and so far all of the Soap API apps I have integrated to our SFDC instance have not had any problems with access limitations.

I plan to contact SFDC directly, but I was hoping someone here may have some experience with this kind of integration question.

Thanks in advance for any info you may provide.

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    As an alternative to having your CMS call into Salesforce, maybe you could setup an integration to periodically update your CMS database with these additional flags. You can even use Outbound Messaging in Salesforce to have it do a SOAP call out to some endpoint every time a contact record changes. – Daniel Hoechst Aug 1 '12 at 18:18
  • I had considered this route. It may actually be something that we implement in the future if we start to get a lot of API calls happening (based on overall usage and system adoption). For now, we really only need to query a few values per login. The prototype I have working in my SFDC dev instance seems to working efficiently. The only reason why I ask the original question is because I do not want to run into any unseen limitations on the API calls. Thanks so much for the feedback. – Ryan S Aug 1 '12 at 20:35
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Probably the best way to find out how close to the limits you might run is to check out your current usage. You can find it under "Company Information" (under Company Profile) in Setup. The API limits are on a 24 hour basis.

If you are currently using the API, you can use that as a baseline and potentially project based on the number of users.

And obviously I'd recommend doing whatever you can to limit the callout when it isn't necessary.

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  • Also note that they have an "additional API calls" line item that they can sell you in batches of 10k API calls. Contact your AE for pricing on this if you have the budget and volume to need it. – ca_peterson Aug 1 '12 at 18:08
  • Thanks for the feedback. This is a great starting point. I was not aware that this data was available. – Ryan S Aug 1 '12 at 20:30
  • why isn't this marked an answer yet? – Vid L Aug 5 '12 at 16:36
  • Sorry, I just did. ;) – Ryan S Aug 6 '12 at 18:13
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As far as the Salesforce SOAP API is concerned, 1 API call is a single HTTP request to the API.

No matter how trivial or complex the API call is, one API call is consumed. This is also true for the ReST API.

Every API call is consumed for 24 hours. That means that 24 hours after your API call was made, your API call is "freed" and can be used again.

As johsbirk stated, you can see your API call limit in Setup > Company Information.

If you find that this type of integration with Salesforce consumes too many API calls, perhaps you could cache the information within Drupal for a certain period of time?

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  • This is also great information. This helps me understand how to manage and monitor these API calls. I appreciate it very much. – Ryan S Aug 1 '12 at 20:31
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Yes, they will cut access to the API if you hit the limit. But it may only last for an hour or so. From my experience it's in a revolving 24 hour cycle. So each hour some API Calls will free up as it checks the previous 24 hours period.

I'd recommend setting up outbound messages into your CMS DB or a DB to run alongside the CMS and send the fields required into it so that you won't have to worry about API limits down the road if things get hectic and you may not have time to get back to it.

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