Report Scraping

Back in April, the Salesforce Heretic, wrote up a method to programatically pull data out of Salesforce.com reprots (covered here).

Gareth Davies, founder and CEO of Upside-Outcomes (covered by Salesforce here), recently sent me a note that he created code based on the Heretic's post.  We agreed it would be something my readers may find useful.

Follow the link below to read his note and download the code.

Dear Mark,

One of our customers wished to analyze the relative performance of groups of sales based on a complex comparison algorithm. While we could create the analysis relatively easily, it was obvious that the majority of the programming time (and cost) would arise from making an interface to allow our client to select which sales he wanted to include in each sample set. The combinations were seemingly endless – record type, sales team, sales person, dates, product- type etc. and the definition for each set had to be stored for future use and/or modification. What was most annoying for us both was that a mechanism already exists within Salesforce.com that enables this management of object collections – it’s the reporting engine – unfortunately it cannot be accessed through the API.

Luckily the Salesforce Heretic described a method for gaining access to reports in his blog post http://sfdc-heretic.warped-minds.com/2006/04/10/progmatic-access-to-salesforcecom-reports/ from April 10th 2006. We implemented this alogorithm in two c# classes one that generates a list of reports and another that will take a report and place the results into a Microsoft DataTable.

We have always meant to release this code back to the community and thought that this would a great forum for doing so.  We have licensed the code in this distribution to be free to modify, use, include in commercial products and to re-distribute if you acknowledge its creators – for details please refer to the license conditions in the code. Remember that this code is not supported by us or Salesforce.com and there is no guarantee that the reporting interface will not change in the future. In the meantime, we hope you find it useful.

Gareth

Download ReportingSolution.zip