First... the gripes against Salesforce. Please feel free to open the actual tutorial if you're not interested in reading about how a billion-dollar company published an API with a lack of documentation that would induce balding in even a teenage developer.
16 man-hours of angst and frustration with Salesforce finally yielded a fruit that I can eat and then sleep on. Who would've thought that Salesforce, in its infinite wisdom, with its "NO SOFTWARE" slogan, would overlook the need for a tutorial that shows how to use the Salesforce WSDL in conjunction with the Web Services API. I certainly didn't expect this lack of documentation and support (which is Premier Support in my case).
As a newbie who has never touched a web service before with an immediate and urgent need to call one from my Salesforce org, I had no idea where to begin. Furthermore, my hopes were dashed when I discovered that the Quick Start chapter in the Web Services API Developer's Guide used Apache Axis or Microsoft Visual Studio as an integral part of the tutorial. What happened to "NO SOFTWARE"? Doesn't the Salesforce platform support both inbound messages and outbound messages for web services?
My chagrin was further exacerbated when I discovered to my extreme disappointment that neither the Salesforce-generated Enterprise WSDL nor the Partner WSDL could be directly imported back into Salesforce using the Generate from WSDL feature for Apex classes. Now, where have I encountered a very similar irony... Oh, yeah! I wrote about it in a previous post, "Salesforce CSV Format for Report Exports Is Not IETF RFC 4180-compliant".
Needless to say, when I thought that my first foray into web services would be made less painful by using Salesforce as the learning platform, I thought very, very wrongly. Well, I shouldn't say that, since the experience could've been worse if I had to write two web services from scratch in Java or something.
Anyway, thanks to an abundance of hope and the following inspirations found on the Internet, I believe I now have a workable tutorial that newbies like myself can use to familiarize themselves with using web services in Salesforce.
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If this tutorial helps even one person, I will consider the 16 hours well spent.
