Connecting Salesforce

Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform with a focus on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and sales operation tooling. The Salesforce connector provided with Workplace Search automatically captures, syncs and indexes the following items:

Configuring the Salesforce connector is the first step prior to connecting the Salesforce service to Workplace Search, and requires that you create an OAuth App from the Salesforce platform. To get started, first log in to Salesforce (or Salesforce Sandbox) and access your administrative dashboard.

The procedures for Salesforce’s Classic UI and Lightning UI are very similar but the entry points are different.

Step 1. Click your account avatar in the top right and navigate to Settings:

Figure 79. Connecting Salesforce

Step 2. You’ll see a large list of menu items. Under Build, expand the Create dropdown, then click Apps:

Figure 80. Connecting Salesforce

Workplace Search needs an OAuth App with which to interface. There are two important things to understand before you create one:

We recommend creating a team-owned account for only this app. If access is lost, a new one must be created and the configuration updated in Workplace Search.

Step 3. Scroll to the Connected Apps section and click New:

Figure 81. Connecting Salesforce

From here, proceed to the Creating the OAuth Application step (see below).

Step 1. From the Lightning experience, click Setup in the top right corner:

Figure 82. Connecting Salesforce

Step 2. Select App Manager on the left sidebar under Apps:

Figure 83. Connecting Salesforce

Step 3. Click the New Connected App button:

Figure 84. Connecting Salesforce

And then proceed to the Creating the OAuth Application step (see below).

We must now create the OAuth application that Workplace Search will use to communicate with the Salesforce platform.

Step 1. Let’s start with the basic information:

You can also add a logo for visual identification.

Figure 85. Connecting Salesforce

Step 2. Click the Enable OAuth Settings checkbox: this will unveil many more options. Under Callback URL, add the Workplace Search OAuth redirect URL for your deployment.

You’ll need to move two scopes from Available OAuth Scopes to Selected OAuth Scopes:

Step 3. At the top of the page, click Save. You will now be able to retrieve your Consumer Key and Consumer Secret.

Step 4. From the Workplace Search administrative dashboard’s Sources area, locate Salesforce and provide both the Client ID and Client Secret. Voilà! The Salesforce connector is now configured, and ready to be used to synchronize content. In order to capture data, you must now connect a Salesforce instance with the adequate authentication credentials.

Once the Salesforce connector has been configured, you may connect a Salesforce instance to your organization.

Step 1. Head to your organization’s Workplace Search administrative dashboard, and locate the Sources tab.

Step 2. Click Add a new source.

Step 3. Select Salesforce (or Salesforce Sandbox) in the Configured Sources list, and follow the Salesforce authentication flow as presented.

Step 4. Upon the successful authentication flow, you will be redirected to Workplace Search, and your organization’s Salesforce content will now be captured and will be ready for search gradually as it is synced. Once successfully configured and connected, the Salesforce synchronization automatically occurs every 2 hours.

If you don’t need to index all the content, you can specify the indexing rules via the API. This will help shorten indexing times and limit the size of the index. See Customizing indexing. For Salesforce or Salesforce Sandbox, an applicable rule type would be object_type. An example for limiting content by object_type can be found in the indexing rules guide. Salesforce object types that are available by default:

The following table lists the fields synchronized from the connected source to Workplace Search. The attributes in the table apply to the default search application, as follows:

Standard object types synchronize a predefined set of fields, however, you can use the indexing API to extend this list and index more data from Salesforce for these objects. Use the fields property in object_type rules.

For example, you may want to index the NextStep column from the Opportunity object, allowing you to search over this field. To achieve this, create an indexing rule that looks like the following:

  "indexing": {
    "enabled": true,
    "default_action": "include",
    "rules": [
      {
        "include": "opportunity",
        "filter_type": "object_type",
        "fields": [
          {
            "remote": "NextStep",
            "target": "next_step"
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }

In case you would like to index a field and make it visible in a search application, you can override an existing field for the Salesforce object:

  "indexing": {
    "enabled": true,
    "default_action": "include",
    "rules": [
      {
        "include": "account",
        "filter_type": "object_type",
        "fields": [
          {
            "remote": "AccountNumber",
            "target": "title"
          },
          {
            "remote": "Phone",
            "target": "description"
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }

In addition to standard object types, there is also a way to index custom objects from Salesforce. You must specify the fields you need to index for those objects. By default, only Id, CreatedDate and LastModifiedDate are indexed for a non-standard object type.

For example, if you wanted to index Idea objects, you might specify an indexing configuration that looks like this:

  "indexing": {
    "enabled": true,
    "default_action": "include",
    "rules": [
      {
        "include": "idea",
        "filter_type": "object_type",
        "fields": [
          {
            "remote": "Id",
            "target": "id"
          },
          {
            "remote": "CreatedById",
            "target": "created_by"
          },
          {
            "remote": "CreatedDate",
            "target": "created_at"
          },
          {
            "remote": "LastModifiedById",
            "target": "updated_by"
          },
          {
            "remote": "LastModifiedDate",
            "target": "updated_at"
          },
          {
            "remote": "IsDeleted",
            "target": "is_deleted"
          },
          {
            "remote": "IsMerged",
            "target": "is_merged"
          },
          {
            "remote": "Title",
            "target": "title"
          },
          {
            "remote": "Body",
            "target": "body"
          },
          {
            "remote": "VoteTotal",
            "target": "vote_total"
          },
          {
            "remote": "NumComments",
            "target": "num_comments"
          }
        ]
      }
    ],
    <...>
    "schema": [
      <...>
        "is_deleted": "text",
        "is_merged": "text",
        "vote_total": "number",
        "num_comments": "number"
    ],
    "display": [
      <...>
    ]

See also: