RESTful Web Service Callout using POST with Salesforce.com

March 16th, 2009

The addition of asynchronous Web service callouts to external services is a feature that developers have been requesting for quite awhile in Salesforce.com. Using the new @future annotation, your methods execute the callout when Salesforce.com has resources available. One of the great benefits is that it allows you to perform callouts during trigger executions.

One method of performing callouts is to import your WSDL and let Apex do all of the heavy lifting (WSDL2Apex). The major problem that I found is that Apex does not support RPC/encoded services at this time. Apex does support HTTP Service classes which will allow you to create RESTful services as an alternative. For more information and example code there is a great article entitled Apex Web Services and Callouts.

The HttpResponse class provides a simple GET example but it was hard to find any examples using POST so I thought I’d throw something together.

 
public class WebServiceCallout {
 
    @future (callout=true)
    public static void sendNotification(String name, String city) {
 
        HttpRequest req = new HttpRequest();
        HttpResponse res = new HttpResponse();
        Http http = new Http();
 
        req.setEndpoint('http://my-end-point.com/newCustomer');
        req.setMethod('POST');
        req.setBody('name='+EncodingUtil.urlEncode(name, 'UTF-8')+'&city='+EncodingUtil.urlEncode(city, 'UTF-8'));
        req.setCompressed(true); // otherwise we hit a limit of 32000
 
        try {
            res = http.send(req);
        } catch(System.CalloutException e) {
            System.debug('Callout error: '+ e);
            System.debug(res.toString());
        }
 
    }
 
    // run WebServiceCallout.testMe(); from Execute Anonymous to test
    public static testMethod void testMe() {
        WebServiceCallout.sendNotification('My Test Customer','My City');
    }
 
}

You can execute your callout in a trigger with the following example:

 
trigger AccountCallout on Account (after insert) {
 
	for (Account a : Trigger.new) {
		// make the asynchronous web service callout
		WebServiceCallout.sendNotification(a.Name, a.BillingCity);
	}
 
}

A couple of things to remember when using the future annotation:

No more than 10 method calls per Apex invocation
No more than 200 method calls per Salesforce license per 24 hours
The parameters specified must be primitive dataypes, arrays of primitive datatypes, or collections of primitive datatypes.
Methods with the future annotation cannot take sObjects or objects as arguments.
Methods with the future annotation cannot be used in Visualforce controllers in either getMethodName or setMethodName methods, nor in the constructor.

Categories: Apex, Code Sample, Salesforce

13 Comments

Mike Simonds February 1st, 2010
well I tried this out Jeff and it doesn’t work. Did you actually test this? I had another developer test this actual code and theirs also did not work.

If you place the following code:

<?php
$temp = '
```
'  . print_r($_POST, true) . '
```
‘;
mail(‘me@email.com’, ‘APEX Data’, $temp);

?>

and then test the code it does not show any of the data that you are sending via post, unlike the _$GET example

I would like to see if you would look into this, this is a great tutorial!

Thanks!!

~Mike
jeffdonthemic February 1st, 2010
Mike, what is the error you are getting?
Mike Simonds February 1st, 2010
Here are the two issues:

1) webservicecallout: Methods defined as TestMethod do not support Web service callouts, test skipped – are not supported

2) none of the post data is sent. The script is kicked off because I receive an empty email, but no post data

Just thought that I would let you know

Thanks

~Mike
Mike Simonds February 1st, 2010
Well I was messing around with it and removed the compression:

req.setCompressed(true); // otherwise we hit a limit of 32000

now it works !!

But what can happen if we do not compress it
Raghavender November 4th, 2010
Hi,
Thanks for the above article.Can you helo m eunderstand if we can make a https post from SFDC with an Example.
Thanks.

Raghu
Phillip December 21st, 2010
How do I actually test this. I’m getting the following exception:

15:22:57.270|FATAL_ERROR|System.TypeException: Methods defined as TestMethod do not support Web service callouts, test skipped
Vikram nanduri March 16th, 2011
Thats a great example, thanks Jeff.
but when I run the same example and run the Test, the code coverage is 0% , can you please explain me in brief how to write a test class for such a WebService Callout please.
Integrate reCAPTCHA with Force.com at Cloud Giga March 19th, 2011
[...] only a rather simple ‘GET’ example. Jeff Douglas had in his blog thrown out some good example of snippets on this topic. Here’s what I [...]
Girish Suravajhula June 7th, 2011
Awsome post. Helped me a lot. Thanks
rajesh July 18th, 2011
this is my code

public class lll {

public string errormessage;

public void Login()
{
Http h = new Http();
HttpRequest req = new HttpRequest();
//ErrorMessage=”;
final string baseUrl = ‘http://dskvapconsultancyservices.createsend.com/’;
final string username = ’05b88f78dfc4f00ce93553a79be93d04′;
final string password = ‘rajesh12′;

string apikey=’05b88f78dfc4f00ce93553a79be93d04′;
Blob headerValue = Blob.valueOf(username + ‘:’ + password);
String authorizationHeader = ‘BASIC ‘ +
//EncodingUtil.urlEncode(headerValue);
EncodingUtil.base64Encode(headerValue);
req.setHeader(‘Host’,'http://api.createsend.com’);
req.setHeader(‘Content-length’, ’1753′ );

req.setHeader(‘Connection’,'keep-alive’);
req.setHeader(‘Content-Type’, ‘application/xml;charset=UTF-8′);
req.setHeader(‘Authorization’,authorizationHeader);
//req.setHeader(‘Authorization’,'Basic 05b88f78dfc4f00ce93553a79be93d04==’);
//req.setHeader(‘content-type’, ‘text/xml;charset=utf-8′);
//req.setHeader(‘Content-Length’,’1024′);
//req.setHeader(‘Host’,'http://dskvapconsultancyservices.createsend.com/’);
//req.setHeader(‘Connection’,'keep-alive’);
string body1=”;
body1+=”;
body1+=’ ‘;
body1+=’05b88f78dfc4f00ce93553a79be93d04′;
body1+=”;
body1+=’05b88f78dfc4f00ce93553a79be93d04′;
body1+=’23′;
body1+=”;
body1+=”;
body1+=”;
body1+=”;
body1+=”;
body1+=”;

req.setMethod(‘GET’);
req.setBody(body1);

//req.setEndpoint(baseUrl + ‘?loginType=&un=’+username+’&pw=’+password);
//req.setEndpoint(‘http://api.createsend.com/05b88f78dfc4f00ce93553a79be93d04/v3/clients/clients.xml’);
req.setEndPoint(‘http://api.createsend.com/api/v3/clients.xml’);
//req.setbody(‘http://api.createsend.com/api/v3/clients.xml’);

HttpResponse res = h.send(req);
//req.setEndpoint(baseUrl + ‘apex/UploadFile_DifferentOrg’);

// res = h.send(req);
system.debug(‘********’+res.getbody());
if (res.getBody().indexOf(‘success=true’)>-1)
{
system.debug(‘Success’);
}
}

public void detail()
{

}

}

i am getting errors like
400Failed to deserialize your request.
Please check the documentation and try again.
Fields in error: client
..
System.HttpResponse[Status=Bad Request, StatusCode=400]

please help me in this area

thank you in advance
rajesh July 18th, 2011
i want to integrate salesforce with campaign monitor
please help me
chayakiran September 22nd, 2011
Hi,
Can we consume RPC based WSDL using HTTP Callouts?
Could you please provide some references?
Thanks,
Chayakiran
Jeff Douglas September 24th, 2011
I believe there are some recipes on http://developer.force.com/cookbook.