Setting Up A DataCurrent Salesforce Connection in Yellowfin

This post is related to those who have the DataCurrent Salesforce plugin and are using it in a Yellowfin environment.

First you have to setup a remote application in Salesforce. Here is an overview of Remote Apps in Salesforce : http://help.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/remoteaccess_about.htm.  In the application setup you can go to Create -> Apps and create the remote application there (you can make up a callback URL, it doesn't matter).  Once you do, you will need to get the client id and client secret that salesforce provides.  These values will be used when you connect Yellowfin to Salesforce.

If you are looking for a simple additional way to manage the objects that are queried from Salesforce, open (or create) the file sf_objects.txt in the [Yellowfin Install]/appserver directory.  This file can include a set of salesforce objects (one per line) that are to be included in Yellowfin's view of Salesforce.   If no file is found, all objects will be included.  If a file is found, only the objects listed can be queried by Yellowfin.  This helps make a lighter weight solution because some Salesforce deployments have hundreds of objects, and the structure of each one must be determined by a call to salesforce.  DataCurrent optimizes these calls, but it can be much simpler and faster to connect if you don't allow every Salesforce object to be included in your query set.At this point you can create the data source in Yellowfin.  Select the com.adl.axon.jdbc.JDBCDriver  as the JDBC Driver and enter the connection string with the following structure :

jdbc:salesforce://login.salesforce.com/t?client=[client id]&secret=[client secret]&version=[version]

An example is :

jdbc:salesforce://login.salesforce.com/t?client=3MVG9rFJNUcoUICCAOiuLxpc0OoME4DYymApiRyGZVu4ig6Y25Dxh25Stl9Dxf_r1r1vUXu2QnVujMW&secret=17730055234534501578&version=22.0

Enter your salesforce username and password in the fields provided by Yellowfin below and test the connection.   Note that if you do not see any tables in the list, you likely have an error in the connection.   The best place to look is in the logs directory (start with catalina.out and yellowfin.log).

Finally, if you did not create an sf_objects.txt file to limit the number of objects that can be included in reports you will likely want to increase the PermGenSpace allowed so that plenty of memory will be available to the application for Salesforce objects.  Do this in the [Yellowfin Install]/appserver/bin/catalina.sh (Linux/Mac) by removing the # in the line

# JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -XX:PermSize=64m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m"

Or (Windows) [Yellowfin Install]/appserver/bin/catalina.bat by removing the "rem" in the line

rem set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -XX:PermSize=64m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m

If you need further support after this post, feel free to contact Blacklight Solutions Support Team for help.