Query Salesforce Marketing Data through ODBC in Node.js

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment that allows you to run JavaScript code outside of a browser. With the CData ODBC Driver for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can access live Salesforce Marketing data from Node.js apps and scripts. In this article, we walk through installing node-odbc and the required tools to create a simple Node.js app with access to live Salesforce Marketing data.

With built-in optimized data processing, the CData ODBC Driver offers unmatched performance for interacting with live Salesforce Marketing data in Node.js. When you issue complex SQL queries from Node.js to Salesforce Marketing, the driver pushes supported SQL operations, like filters and aggregations, directly to Salesforce Marketing and utilizes the embedded SQL engine to process unsupported operations client-side (often SQL functions and JOIN operations).

Connecting to Salesforce Marketing Data

If you have not already done so, provide values for the required connection properties in the data source name (DSN). You can use the built-in Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to configure the DSN. This is also the last step of the driver installation. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure a DSN.

Authenticating to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud APIs

Set the User and Password to your login credentials, or to the credentials for a sandbox user if you are connecting to a sandbox account.

Connecting to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud APIs

By default, the data provider connects to production environments. Set UseSandbox to true to use a Salesforce Marketing Cloud sandbox account.

The default Instance is s7 of the Web Services API; however, if you use a different instance, you can set Instance.

Building node-odbc

In order to connect to Salesforce Marketing through the CData ODBC Driver, you need to build node-odbc manually (after installing the required tools).

Installing the Required Tools

The following commands install the tools required to build node-odbc (note the -g parameter, which installs the tools globally).

npm i -g windows-build-tools
npm i -g node-gyp

Building node-odbc

After installing the required tools, create a directory for the Node.js app and install odbc (which builds the binary for us to use in our Node.js script).

mkdir nodeodbc
cd nodeodbc
npm i -g node

Querying Salesforce Marketing from Node.js

With the ODBC Driver installed, a DSN Configured, and node-odbc built, we are ready to query live Salesforce Marketing data from a Node.js app. The sample code below connects to a specific DSN and queries the Subscriber table.

myscript.js

const odbc = require('odbc');

async function querySFMarketingCloud() {
    const connection = await odbc.connect(`DSN=CData SFMarketingCloud Source`);
    const data = await connection.query('SELECT Id, Status FROM Subscriber');
    console.log(data);
}

querySFMarketingCloud();

Once you write the app, use node to execute the script:

node myscript.js

Download a free, 30-day trial of the CData ODBC Driver for Salesforce Marketing Cloud and start working with your live Salesforce Marketing data in Node.js. Reach out to our Support Team if you have any questions.