BOOTSTRAP

The Salesforce API can be used to pull any objects that live in the user’s SF instance. There are two types of objects:

• Standard: Those are the same across all SF instances and have a static schema
• Custom: These are specific to each user’s instance. A user creates a custom object type by creating it in the UI. Think of each custom object like a SQL table with a pre-defined schema. The schema of the object can be discovered through the Describe endpoint on the API. Then when pulling those objects via API one expect them to conform to the schema declared by the endpoint.

To query an object, one must use SOQL, Salesforce’s proprietary SQL language. An example might be SELECT * FROM <sobject.name> WHERE SystemModstamp > 2122-01-18T21:18:20.000Z.

Because the Salesforce connector pulls all objects from Salesforce dynamically, then all streams are dynamically generated accordingly. And at the stage of creating a schema for each stream, we understand whether the stream is dynamic or not (if the stream has one of the following fields: SystemModstamp, LastModifiedDate, CreatedDate, LoginTime, then it is dynamic). Based on this data, for streams that have information about record updates - we filter by updated at, and for streams that have information only about the date of creation of the record (as in the case of streams that have only the CreatedDate field) - we filter by created at. And we assign the Cursor as follows:

@property
def cursor_field(self) -> str:
    return self.replication_key

replication_key is one of the following values: SystemModstamp, LastModifiedDate, CreatedDate, LoginTime.

In addition there are two types of APIs exposed by Salesforce:

• REST API: completely synchronous
• BULK API: has larger rate limit allowance (150k objects per day on the standard plan) but is asynchronous and therefore follows a request-poll-wait pattern.

See the links below for information about specific streams and some nuances about the connector:

• information about streams (Salesforce tab)
• nuances about the connector