Simple Salesforce is a basic Salesforce.com REST API client. The goal is to provide a very low-level interface to the API, returning a dictionary of the API JSON response.
You can find out more regarding the format of the results in the Official Salesforce.com REST API Documentation
There are two ways to gain access to Salesforce
The first is to simply pass the domain of your Salesforce instance and an access token straight to Salesforce()
For example:
from simple_salesforce import Salesforce sf = Salesforce(instance='na1.salesforce.com', session_id='')
If you have the full URL of your instance (perhaps including the schema, as is included in the OAuth2 request process), you can pass that in instead using instance_url:
from simple_salesforce import Salesforce sf = Salesforce(instance_url='https://na1.salesforce.com', session_id='')
To login, simply include the Salesforce method and pass in your Salesforce username, password and token (this is usually provided when you change your password):
from simple_salesforce import Salesforce sf = Salesforce(username='[email protected]', password='password', security_token='token')
If you'd like to enter a sandbox, simply add sandbox=True to your Salesforce() call.
For example:
from simple_salesforce import Salesforce sf = Salesforce(username='[email protected]', password='password', security_token='token', sandbox=True)
Note that specifying if you want to use a sandbox is only necessary if you are using the built-in username/password/security token authentication and is used exclusively during the authentication step.
To create a new 'Contact' in Salesforce:
sf.Contact.create({'LastName':'Smith','Email':'[email protected]'})
This will return a dictionary such as {u'errors': [], u'id': u'003e0000003GuNXAA0', u'success': True}
To get a dictionary with all the information regarding that record, use:
contact = sf.Contact.get('003e0000003GuNXAA0')
To change that contact's last name from 'Smith' to 'Jones' and add a first name of 'John' use:
sf.Contact.update('003e0000003GuNXAA0',{'LastName': 'Jones', 'FirstName': 'John'})
To delete the contact:
sf.Contact.delete('003e0000003GuNXAA0')
Note that Update, Delete and Upsert actions return the associated Salesforce HTTP Status Code
It's also possible to write select queries in Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL) and search queries in Salesforce Object Search Language (SOSL).
SOQL queries are done via
sf.query("SELECT Id, Email FROM Contact WHERE LastName = 'Jones'")
If, due to an especially large result, Salesforce adds a nextRecordsUrl to your query result, such as "nextRecordsUrl" : "/services/data/v26.0/query/01gD0000002HU6KIAW-2000", you can pull the additional results with either the ID or the full URL (if using the full URL, you must pass 'True' as your second argument)
sf.query_more("01gD0000002HU6KIAW-2000")
sf.query_more("/services/data/v26.0/query/01gD0000002HU6KIAW-2000", True)
As a convenience, to retrieve all of the results in a single local method call use
sf.query_all("SELECT Id, Email FROM Contact WHERE LastName = 'Jones'")
SOSL queries are done via:
sf.search("FIND {Jones}")
There is also 'Quick Search', which inserts your query inside the {} in the SOSL syntax. Be careful, there is no escaping!
sf.quick_search("Jones")
Search and Quick Search return None if there are no records, otherwise they return a dictionary of search results.
More details about syntax is available on the Salesforce Query Language Documentation Developer Website
To insert or update (upsert) a record using an external ID, use:
sf.Contact.upsert('customExtIdField__c/11999',{'LastName': 'Smith','Email': '[email protected]'})
To retrieve basic metadata use:
sf.Contact.metadata()
To retrieve a description of the object, use:
sf.Contact.describe()
There are a few helper classes that are used internally and available to you.
Included in them are SalesforceLogin, which takes in a username, password, security token, optional boolean sandbox indicator and optional version and returns a touple of (session_id, sf_instance) where session_id is the session ID to use for authentication to Salesforce and sf_instance is the domain of the instance of Salesforce to use for the session.
For example, to use SalesforceLogin for a sandbox account you'd use:
from simple_salesforce import SalesforceLogin
session_id, instance = SalesforceLogin('[email protected]', 'password', 'token', True)
Simply leave off the final True if you do not wish to use a sandbox.
Also exposed is the SFType class, which is used internally by the __getattr__() method in the Salesforce() class and represents a specific SObject type. SFType requires object_name (i.e. Contact), session_id (an authentication ID), sf_instance (hostname of your Salesforce instance), and an optional sf_version
To add a Contact using the default version of the API you'd use:
from simple_salesforce import SFType
contact = SFType('Contact','sesssionid','na1.salesforce.com')
contact.create({'LastName':'Smith','Email':'[email protected]'})
This plugin was built in-house by the team at New Organizing Institute led by Nick Catalano and is released under an open source Apache 2.0 license. The team at Cedexis has contributed to the project as well.
Authentication mechanisms were adapted from Dave Wingate's RestForce and licensed under a MIT license