Author: Abhishek Dhakad
What is Anypoint Data Gateway?
Anypoint Data Gateway allows you to easily integrate data stored in legacy back-office systems with Salesforce. Data Gateway lets you access your data from within Salesforce itself, using a simple point-and-click visual interface to wield the full functionality of Salesforce on your external data. It does not require storing any data in salesforce, whenever required it pulls data from back-office systems and displays in salesforce.
Data Gateway supports integration with systems such as SAP, Oracle, MS SQL, MySQL, and others. Connecting to these systems is instantaneous — just fill in the parameters such as host, user, etc., and you’re done. The ability to quickly connect with diverse back-office systems eliminates the need to create separate design environments, or to implement extensive training for Salesforce users.
Prerequisites
- Anypoint platform account with Data gateway
- Salesforce account (Need to purchase a license for salesforce connect to implement this functionality)
Configuration steps
Following steps you will need to follow to configure salesforce connect and Data gateway.
- Configure salesforce connect
- Go to the salesforce AppExchange main page and look for Anypoint Data Gateway among the available applications. To quickly find it, enter “anypoint data gateway” in the search box at the top of the screen.
And click on Get it now to install it to your salesforce account.
- Select the Environment in which you want to install it and select users who can access it. You can edit properties in Manage connected Apps.
- In the Permitted users drop-down menu, select Admin approved users are pre-authorized.
- Configure Anypoint data gateway
- Data Gateway link will be present on your Anypoint Platform home page in the left navigation bar.
- The Data Gateway page will look like this where you will have options for configuring a salesforce account, create a connection (for backend database), and create a gateway.
- In the Salesforce tab, it will ask to login to the salesforce account in which we have configured salesforce connect.
- Once login, it will show all the details to access the OData endpoint. The endpoint can be accessed using the credentials specified.
- Now switch to the Connections tab and configure backend database details. Click on create connection and select the database type.
- After selecting the DB, enter connection details and test it for a successful connection. In case if your database is secured behind the firewall you use VPC to connect to it.
- In the next step, you need to create the gateway, so go to the Gateways tab and create a new gateway.
- In the connection, select a newly created database connection and set a username and password for the gateway. Click on create a gateway.
- Once the gateway is created, go to Salesforce and select the gateway to publish the data.
Now all configurations are done and your gateway is ready to use.
Testing the data
- Login to the salesforce account in which salesforce connect is installed.
- Go to the Setup -> External Data Sources you can see the newly created entry for external Data Source.
- In External Object, you can see all the table objects from the backend database. (here is the Customers table). On clicking the object you can see all field level information of the particular table.
- In the salesforce, you can see real time data from the database. Any addition, deletion, or update of the data in the backend database will reflect in salesforce immediately.
References
- Mulesoft official document — https://docs.mulesoft.com/data-gateway/
- Salesforce connect — https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.apexcode.meta/apexcode/platform_connect_about.htm
