Many Pies

Many Pies

Wednesday, August 03, 2022

FormAssembly Salesforce connector review

One of the consultants we used for our switch to Salesforce and NPSP recommended we use FormAssembly for getting data from webforms into Salesforce. That was a very good recommendation, and so I'd like to say a bit about my experience with the FormAssembly to Salesforce integration.

FormAssembly has various integrations, Salesforce is only one of them. They can run at one of three points - when a form is loaded, when it's submitted and after it's submitted. The difference between the latter two is subtle. When you click the submit button then "when" run is one and the user gets the success page when it's complete, or an error if it fails for any reason. At that point the "after" one runs and the user is unware.

I'm not going to do a full tutorial as the FormAssembly documentation is very good. I'm just writing here to say that it's very easy to use, even if you're not a Salesforce admin. When you start using the connector you can create, update or lookup an object. Depending on how that went you can then create, update or lookup a subsidiary object and so on.

So a typical case might be that you lookup the email address on the form to find a contact with that email address. If you find them carry on to the next step, otherwise you add them. 



You can do all this by clicking around the user interface, so it's very #clicksnotcode. FormAssembly has a formula function, not specific to the Salesforce connector, and this can be used, for example, to turn two address line fields into a single Mailing Street field with a carriage return between the two lines:

@CONCATENATE(%%tfa_10%%,@IF(%%tfa_11%%,@CONCATENATE(@CHAR(13),%%tfa_11%%),""))

tfa_nn are the internal names for the fields.

This combination of FormAssembly and Salesforce has met our needs so I'm very pleased with it.

Update: I wrote a followup post on FormAssembly and Salesforce advanced techniques

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