Cloud computing

When I develop web service providers in Salesforce, I often create mock objects. The reason for this is when I need to return a defined set of fields as a list for many records. The set of fields might be only a subset from an object (standard or custom) or a mix of fields for several objects. Since it is not possible to return maps (sets of key-value pair) from a web service (since there are no such equivalent in SOAP) I have come to the conclusion that this is the best way.

A simple example on how to demonstrate how this works would be a web service that has one method with the task to return records for the Opportunity object between a start date and an end date as the arguments to the method. The caller of the web service are only interested in 5 fields of the opportunity however and not all. Returning a list of opportunity records would be easy but not relevant and would be to send a lot of data not needed for the caller or maybe also not allowed for the caller to see. Creating 5 methods would be just stupid.
The web service would provide a WSDL-file to the caller that wouldn’t have to be changed either even though a field need to be added or removed in the future since the return value would be the same anyhow.

This is what it would look like:

global with sharing class GetOpportunityInfo {

// Define mock object
global class MockOpportunity {
	webservice ID OpportunityId;
	webservice ID AccountId;
	webservice ID AccountOwner;
	webservice String OpportunityName;
	webservice String StageName;
}

/**
 * getOpportunityInfoFields - Webservice method used to get opportunity information
 *
 * @param 'startDate' Date used as part of the filter criteria. Compare with lastModified date.
 * @param 'endDate' Date used as part of the filter criteria. Compare with lastModified date.
 * @return List of MockOpportunity objects
 */
webservice static List<mockOpportunity> getOpportunityInfoFields(Datetime startDate,Datetime endDate) {	

List<Opportunity> opps = [select Id,AccountId,Account.OwnerId,Name,StageName from Opportunity where LastModifiedDate > :startDate and LastModifiedDate < :endDate];		

// Create Mock Opportunity list
List<mockOpportunity> mockOpportunities = new List<mockOpportunity>();

// Loop through list of opportunities matching the criteria
for (Opportunity opp : opps) {
	// Create instance of MockOpportunity object
	MockOpportunity mOpportunity = new MockOpportunity();

	// Set fields of mock object from current opportunity in loop
	mOpportunity.OpportunityId = opp.Id;
	mOpportunity.AccountId = opp.AccountId;
	mOpportunity.AccountOwner = opp.Account.OwnerId;
	mOpportunity.OpportunityName = opp.Name;
	mOpportunity.StageName = opp.StageName;

	// Add mock agreement to mock agreement list
	mockOpportunities.add(mOpportunity);

	// Kill object reference
	mOpportunity = null;
}				

return mockOpportunities;
}

I don’t know if this is the common way of work or not or if anyone have other or better solutions. Anyway, I hope this can bring joy to anyone. Let me know if you got use of it!

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Tagged as: mock objects, provider, salesforce, webservice