Pushing Leads to Salesforce with PHP
Recently our company began a trial of Salesforce.com. In doing so we opted not to layout the cash for the program that gives you full API access (at the moment any ways). I needed a way to push leads into the system. They have a standard web-to-lead process that requires a form submission and then post back to return URL. I already had a lot of forms that I was using to capture data. Instead of reworking all my forms, I just created a way to post to the Salesforce web-to-lead form from the server side.
I started by creating a basic function which passes in the data I want to capture and pushes it to the Sales force form.
function add_to_salesforce($source, $name, $email, $company, $city, $state, $zip, $phone, $description, $street = "")
{
// simple way of breaking apart the name
$names = split(" ", $name);
//set POST variables
$url = 'https://www.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.WebToLead?encoding=UTF-8';
$fields = array(
'last_name'=>urlencode($names[1]),
'first_name'=>urlencode($names[0]),
'street'=>urlencode($street),
'city'=>urlencode($city),
'state'=>urlencode($state),
'zip'=>urlencode($zip),
'company'=>urlencode($company),
'description'=>urlencode($description),
'email'=>urlencode($email),
'phone'=>urlencode($phone),
'mycustomefieldid' => urlencode($source), // custom field
'oid' => 'youridgoeshere', // insert with your id
'retURL' => urlencode('http://www.yourreturnurl.com'), // sending this just in case
'debug' => '1',
'debugEmail' => urlencode("youremail@youremail.com"), // your debugging email
);
//url-ify the data for the POST
foreach($fields as $key=>$value) { $fields_string .= $key.'='.$value.'&'; }
rtrim($fields_string,'&');
//open connection
$ch = curl_init();
//set the url, number of POST vars, POST data
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST,count($fields));
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$fields_string);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
//execute post
$result = curl_exec($ch);
//close connection
curl_close($ch);
}
Once that was setup all I had to do was call the function (which I wrapped in a class with something like this:
$myclass = new Myclass;
$myclass->add_to_salesforce("Contact Page", $name, $email_address, $company, "", "", "", $phone, $enquiry);
Works like a charm so far. If you’ve got a slicker way of perfoming this operation, let me know, I’d love to learn how you did it.
8 Comments, Comment or Ping
phpandsfdc
Chris,
Great post! It's not necessarily apparent that both the client and server can send the POST request to Salesforce, which when sent from the server also allows you to send only the information you need in the lead, and avoid sending users' passwords, etc… If you're interested, I wrote up a little post on the differences between using Web-to-Lead and using the API, the address is http://phpandsalesforce.com/2009/06/21/lead-generation-via-the-salesforce-com-api-vs-web-to-lead/
Jun 24th, 2009
Pedro Jose
Hello friend, I belong to a Spanish company and so far Salesforce giving me many problems.
I have a question for you, guaranteed way you enter data in Salesforce that you see the origin of the candidate (eg, google adwords, direct web, ..)
What do you mean, 'oid' => 'youridgoeshere', / / insert with your id … Will be assumed to know the id?
I would be happy to answer because I have serious problems with the system.
Jul 20th, 2009
Nick
Sorry for asking a dumb question! But how do you call this function?
$myclass = new Myclass;$myclass->add_to_salesforce("Contact Page", $name, $email_address, $company, "", "",
Would it be called when the html form is submitted? If so how would I do this?
Thanks!
Nick
Sep 7th, 2009
Ben
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the article - very useful.
I've got this working on my website "contact us" page, but when I urlencode the SF field called "description" (which I've been asked to post the contact form's "comments" field into) it isn't getting un-encoded when it appears in Salesforce, so it ends up like this:
This+is+a+test+%0D%0AUnfortunately+non-alphanumeric+characters+have+to+be+encoded+like+this%0D%0A%0D%0A%21%22%A3%24%25%5E%26%2A%28%29_%2B%0D%0A%0D%0A-%3D%7B%7D%5B%5D%3A%40%7E%3B%27%23%3C%3E%3F%2C.%2F%AC%60%60%A6
Any ideas how to avoid this?
Many thanks!
Ben
Dec 2nd, 2009
cwpollock
Hmm.. can't say that it's doing that for me. Are you doing a GET instead of POST form request. That could be the issue. If not, then try doing a PHP urldecode on the posted var before you push it over to salesforce.
Dec 2nd, 2009
Blake
Is there anyway to customize the fields which are populated in salesforce? I have a select list that asks the customer where they heard about us. I want this to auto fill out my custom field "Web Source" in the sales force new lead that gets created. How can I do this within this function you posted?
Aug 16th, 2010
cwpollock
@Blake
You need to create the fields you want to populate in sales force and then when you walk through their form creation wizard it will give you and ID for that custom field. You can then get the information out of the post and associate it with that sales force filed id just like I do in the example above.
Aug 16th, 2010
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