While writing the {salesforcer}
package we were keenly aware that many folks were already using the
{RForcecom} package to connect to Salesforce. In order to foster
adoption and switching between the packages {salesforcer} replicates the
functionality of many {RForcecom} functions so that you will only need
to swap out library(RForcecom) for
library(salesforcer) and still have production scripts
perform as expected.
As of June 9, 2021, the {RForcecom} package was removed from CRAN. You can still use it by installing from the archive, but we strongly recommend using {salesforcer} instead. The existing functionality in {RForcecom} has been further optimized within {salesforcer} and new functionality has been added too.
Basic authentication (password and security token) will no longer
work since Salesforce announced that all customers will be migrated to
MFA beginning February 1st, 2022 (link).
As a result, the basic authentication routine used {RForcecom} and the
legacy, compatibility method written into {salesforcer} will no longer
work. Please migrate to {salesforcer} and use sf_auth() to
generate an OAuth 2.0 token. The examples below will no longer work.
{salesforcer} supports OAuth 2.0 authentication which is preferred, but for backward compatibility provides the username-password authentication routine implemented by {RForcecom}. Here is an example running the function from each of the packages side-by-side and producing the same result.
First, authenticate and load any required packages for your analysis.
# Beginning February 1, 2022, basic authentication will no longer work. You must
# log in to Salesforce using MFA (generating an OAuth 2.0 token typically from
# the browser).
# the RForcecom way
# RForcecom::rforcecom.login(username, paste0(password, security_token),
# apiVersion=getOption("salesforcer.api_version"))
# replicated in salesforcer package
session <- salesforcer::rforcecom.login(username,
paste0(password, security_token),
apiVersion = getOption("salesforcer.api_version"))
session['sessionID'] <- "{MASKED}"
sessionNote that we must set the API version here because calls to session
will not create a new sessionId and then we are stuck with
version 35.0 (the default from
RForcecom::rforcecom.login()). Some functions in
{salesforcer} implement API calls that are only available after version
35.0.
“CRUD” operations (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) in the
{RForcecom} package only operate on one record at a time. One benefit to
using the {salesforcer} package is that these operations will accept a
named vector (one record) or an entire data.frame or
tbl_df of records to churn through. However, rest assured
that the replicated functions behave exactly the same way if you are
hesitant to making the switch.
Here is an example showing the reduction in code of using {salesforcer} if you would like to create multiple records.
n <- 2
new_contacts <- tibble(FirstName = rep("Test", n),
LastName = paste0("Contact-Create-", 1:n))
# the RForcecom way (requires a loop)
# rforcecom_results <- NULL
# for(i in 1:nrow(new_contacts)){
# temp <- RForcecom::rforcecom.create(session,
# objectName = "Contact",
# fields = unlist(slice(new_contacts,i)))
# rforcecom_results <- bind_rows(rforcecom_results, temp)
# }
# the better way in salesforcer to do multiple records
salesforcer_results <- sf_create(new_contacts, object_name="Contact")
salesforcer_results{salesforcer} also has better printing and type-casting when returning query result thanks to features of the {readr} package.
The {RForcecom} package has the function
rforcecom.getObjectDescription() which returns a
data.frame with one row per field on an object. The same
function in {salesforcer} is named
sf_describe_object_fields() and also has better printing
and datatype casting by using tibbles.