Salesforce External Object Reporting with OData
Reporting against external objects has been highly anticipated based on numerous requests on the Idea on the success community. Back in Winter ‘16, Mark Kovacevich blogged on a popular workaround to use external objects for reporting with custom visual force pages and apex controllers. But starting in Winter ’17, there is much rejoicing among report geeks as the Salesforce Connect product team delivers a seamless reporting experience with external data made possible by support for a standard OData REST interface.
Ralf Schundelmeier Director of Product Management, Salesforce and Sumit Sarkar Chief Data Evangelist, Progress DataDirect will host a webinar with live Q&A and a demo of this new capability for Salesforce developers.
For a developer preview, below are screenshots of the high level steps from the Winter ’17 release notes on getting started with external object reporting. The external data in this example is accessed from an on-premises SQL Server data mart connected on-demand by the Progress DataDirect OData Reporting service for Salesforce Connect. Other popular reporting OData feeds are available with on-premises reporting platforms such as SAP Business Objects and SQL Server Reporting Services.
Preview on Creating Salesforce External Object Reports
1. Get started with an External Object Report
2. To expand on this, create a new report type that blends standard objects with external data
Webinar: Configuring Salesforce External Object Reports
Date: December 15, 2016
Time: 12:00 pm ET
During this webinar, you’ll get:
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An introduction to external objects and their new capabilities for reporting and Wave trending
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Steps to setup Salesforce reports with external data sources
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Steps to produce OData from warehouses, marts, lakes and other reporting systems
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Report considerations and limitations with Salesforce Connect
Resources
About the Author
Sumit Sarkar is the Chief Data Evangelist at Progress Software new to developing on the Salesforce platform. He has presented five Dreamforce sessions on data connectivity including the most recent session from DF16 on External Objects for External Big Data Platforms. Contact Sumit Sarkar: