Discover how a bimodal integration strategy can address the major data management challenges facing your organization today.
Get the Report →Build a Simple VCL Application for Salesforce Data
How to build a simple VCL Application to view Salesforce data in RAD Studio using the CData ODBC Driver for Salesforce.
Embarcadero RAD Studio provides a development environment for Delphi and C++Builder applications. With the CData ODBC Driver for Salesforce, you gain access to live Salesforce data within RAD Studio, abstracting the data into tables, views, and stored procedures that can be used to retrieve and update Salesforce data. This article will walk through connecting to Salesforce and creating a simple VCL application with the Form Designer.
About Salesforce Data Integration
Accessing and integrating live data from Salesforce has never been easier with CData. Customers rely on CData connectivity to:
- Access to custom entities and fields means Salesforce users get access to all of Salesforce.
- Create atomic and batch update operations.
- Read, write, update, and delete their Salesforce data.
- Leverage the latest Salesforce features and functionalities with support for SOAP API versions 30.0.
- See improved performance based on SOQL support to push complex queries down to Salesforce servers.
- Use SQL stored procedures to perform actions like creating, retrieving, aborting, and deleting jobs, uploading and downloading attachments and documents, and more.
Users frequently integrate Salesforce data with:
- other ERPs, marketing automation, HCMs, and more.
- preferred data tools like Power BI, Tableau, Looker, and more.
- databases and data warehouses.
For more information on how CData solutions work with Salesforce, check out our Salesforce integration page.
Getting Started
Create a Connection to Salesforce Data
If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.
There are several authentication methods available for connecting to Salesforce: Login, OAuth, and SSO. The Login method requires you to have the username, password, and security token of the user.
If you do not have access to the username and password or do not wish to require them, you can use OAuth authentication.
SSO (single sign-on) can be used by setting the SSOProperties, SSOLoginUrl, and TokenUrl connection properties, which allow you to authenticate to an identity provider. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for more information.
You can then follow the steps below to use the Data Explorer to create a FireDAC connection to Salesforce data.
- In a new VCL Forms application, expand the FireDAC node in the Data Explorer.
- Right-click the ODBC Data Source node in the Data Explorer.
- Click Add New Connection.
- Enter a name for the connection.
- In the FireDAC Connection Editor that appears, set the DataSource property to the name of the ODBC DSN for Salesforce.
Create VCL Applications with Connectivity to Salesforce Data
Follow the procedure below to start executing queries to Salesforce data from a simple VCL application that displays the results of a query in a grid.
-
Drop a TFDConnection component onto the form and set the following properties:
- ConnectionDefName: Select the FireDAC connection to Salesforce data.
- Connected: Select True from the menu and, in the dialog that appears, enter your credentials.
-
Drop a TFDQuery component onto the form and set the properties below:
- Connection: Set this property to the TFDConnection component, if this component is not already specified.
SQL: Click the button in the SQL property and enter a query. For example:
SELECT Contact.Name, SUM(Account.AnnualRevenue) FROM Contact, Account GROUP BY Contact.Name
- Active: Set this property to true.
Drop a TDataSource component onto the form and set the following property:
- DataSet: In the menu for this property, select the name of the TFDQuery component.
-
Drop a TDBGrid control onto the form and set the following property:
- DataSource: Select the name of the TDataSource.
- Drop a TFDGUIxWaitCursor onto the form — this is required to avoid a run-time error.
You now have an executable application that displays the results of the SQL Query set in the TFDQuery object.
Related Articles
Below you can find other articles for using the CData ODBC Driver with RAD Studio, Delphi, and C++ Builder.