Building a Salesforce Integration

In this tutorial, we'll build a basic Salesforce integration that syncs leads from your app to your customers' Salesforce accounts.

This guide demonstrates how to sync data from your app to your customer's Salesforce accounts. For demonstration purposes, we’ll build a workflow that creates a new lead in our user's Salesforce using lead data from our app. You can use the concepts covered in this tutorial in other applications as well.

Prerequisites

1. Connect your Salesforce application to Paragon.

2. Add your Salesforce app credentials to activate your integration.

1. Build your workflow

Step 1.1: Create a new Salesforce workflow

It's important that you give your workflows a descriptive name to provide the best experience for your user.

Step 1.2: Create an App Event

Since we want to pass lead data from our application to our customer's Salesforce account, we'll use the App Event trigger. Select the trigger step from the Workflow Editor, then click "App Event".

Select Choose an App Event > Create new App Event, then add the following parameters:

• Event Name - the name of your App Event. (e.g. Lead Created)

• Event Schema - example JSON Object that will be sent from your app. JSON objects are written in key/value pairs. Keys must be strings, and values must be a valid JSON data type (string, number, object, array, boolean or null)

You can use the sample App Event Schema below to jumpstart your progress:

Lead Created

{
    "first_name": "Bowie",
    "last_name": "Foo",
    "email": "[e-mail]",
    "company": "Paragon",
    "title": "Chief Dog Officer"
}

Step 1.3: Add a Salesforce step

Add a Salesforce step to your workflow and use the dropdown menu to select Create record as the action and Lead as the record type. You can input the fields from your App Event by typing two left curly braces {{ to bring up the dynamic variable menu.

Step 1.4: Deploy your workflow

Now that your workflow is all set up, deploy your workflow by clicking the "Deploy" button in the top-right of your screen.

2. Generate a Paragon Signing Key

To generate a Signing Key, go to Settings > Signing Keys in your Paragon dashboard. You should store this key in an environment secrets file.

For security reasons, we don’t store your Private Key and cannot show it to you again, so we recommend you download the key and store it someplace secure.

3. Install the Paragon SDK

The Paragon SDK gives you access to the Paragon global, which you can access as paragon.

You can install the Paragon SDK with npm:

npm install @useparagon/connect

The SDK can be imported in your client-side JavaScript files as a module:

import { paragon } from '@useparagon/connect';

Don't want to install the SDK just yet?

Use Paragon's Hosted Demo Environment to start testing your integrations without embedding the SDK in your application. Learn more.

4. Authenticate your user

Next, you'll need a library in your target language to sign JWTs with RS256. You can find one in your language at https://jwt.io/.

If your application is a fully client-rendered single-page app, you may have to create and use an additional API endpoint to retrieve a signed JWT (or reuse an existing endpoint that handles authentication or user info).

Step 4.1: Sign a Paragon User Token

The Paragon User Token is a signed JWT that minimally must include the sub, iat, and exp claims:

JavaScript

{
	// Uniquely identifying key for a user
	"sub": "the-user-id",

	// Issue timestamp, should be the current time
	"iat": 1608600116

	// Expiry timestamp for token, such as 1 hour from time of signature (iat)
	"exp": 1608603716
}

Just for testing: Generating one-off JWTs

Use the Paragon JWT Generator to generate test JWTs for your development purposes. In production, static tokens should never be used.

Step 4.2: Call paragon.authenticate()

You'll call paragon.authenticate in your view with a JWT signed by your backend using the library chosen in Step 4.1. This JWT is the Paragon user token.

.authenticate should be called at the beginning of your application's lifecycle in all cases. This is to make sure that the userToken is always as fresh as possible, with respect to your user's existing session on your own site. You may reference Installing the Connect SDK for a detailed explanation on how to use .authenticate.

paragon.authenticate(
	// You can find your project ID in the Overview tab of any Integration
	"38b1f170-0c43-4eae-9a04-ab85325d99f7",

	// See Setup for how to encode your user token
	"eyJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.ey..."
);

5. Connect to your integration

Now that you've authenticated your user, you can call paragon.connect() to bring up the Paragon Connect Portal.

JavaScript

paragon.connect("salesforce");

Note: Toggle your workflow from the Configuration tab to enable your workflow after connecting to your Salesforce account.

6. Send an App Event

Lastly, we'll send an App Event whenever a lead is created in your app. App Events can be sent from your application using the Paragon SDK or REST API. In both cases, you must pass two parameters:

• name - the event name defined in your App Event

• payload - the event payload that should match the event schema defined in your App Event

See the code examples below for how to send App Events using the Paragon SDK or API.

JavaScript SDK

var eventName = "Lead Created";
var eventPayload = {
    "first_name": "Bowie",
    "last_name": "Foo",
    "email": "[e-mail]",
    "company": "Paragon",
    "title": "Chief Dog Officer"
};

// Trigger the "Lead Created" App Event
paragon.event(eventName, eventPayload)

REST API

// Trigger the "Lead Created" App Event
POST https://api.useparagon.com/projects/<Paragon Project ID>/sdk/events/trigger

Authorization: Bearer <Paragon User Token>
Content-Type: application/json

{ 
    "name": "Lead Created", 
    "payload": {
        "first_name": "Bowie",
        "last_name": "Foo",
        "email": "[e-mail]",
        "company": "Paragon",
        "title": "Chief Dog Officer"
    }
}

When sending live events from your application, Paragon will not validate that your event payload matches the defined event schema.

Great work! We just built a Salesforce integration that syncs new leads from your app to our customers' Salesforce accounts.