thechild / sf3

Sync your Macs address book & calendar to Salesforce.com

SF3

SF3 is an OSX application that uses Apple's Sync Services to synchronized contacts & task/events between Salesforce.com and your Mac.

SF3 requires OSX 10.6 and a Salesforce.com account

Note: Given the death bed status of the underlying Sync Services API, I'm not planning to do anymore work on this project.

Most of the complexity in this project is handling data model mismatches between the 2 data models, for tasks & events there are minor differences, however for contacts there are more significant differences, most notably that AdressBook uses child entities for addresses, phone numbers, IM, email address etc while in Salesforce.com, its an entirly flat model. Most of the problems come in support subsets of the child entities, e.g. one work and one home phone number

The actual data model mapping is built up in layers

• Mappers - the set of entities to sync/map
• BaseMapper - each entity to sync/map is represented by a sub class of base mapper
• FieldMappingInfo - each data point in the entity is mapped using a FieldMappingInfo (or subclass of) some fields, particularly in contacts are managed "by hand" with code directly at the entity mapping level.

The code in the project is grouped as follows

• common: shared code between many of my OSX/Salesforce.com projects, for SF3 this is mainly about login & keychain management.
• FieldMappers: FieldMappingInfo and all its entity specific sub classes
• Object Mappers: BaseMapper, plus the entity specific sub classes and some related peices
• Classes: grab bag of random stuff to organize, SFCubed is the primary entry point.
• Sforce Api: set of classes for interacting with the Salesforce.com Web Services API.

There is much to do

• Support fast sync, currently slow push everying each time we sync.
• review error handling, both from SyncServices and from SF API calls.
• create an URL in the contact to take you to their SFDC page.
• handle fields hidden by FLS
• custom field mappings (would be useful for home email)
• support being able to pick which calendar in iCal to sync to (this would then enable entourage <-> ical <-> sfdc, this is less important now that outlook 2011 syncs all the local calendars)
• for contacts support an AddressBook subset using a Salesforce.com group
• improve logging & diagnostics, fix (aka kill) the stupid logging drawer.
• UI clean-up
• move sync process off the main thread
• prompt/do an AdressBook & iCal backup on first run
• write some help
• investigate "conflicts" on dates that are the same date (probably some TZ weirdness)
• re-occuring events (ugh)
• one of the reason we pull all the changes before working on any is to support the progress bar, perhaps we should give up on the progress bar, and just use an indterminate progress spinner instead.
• show details of changes proposed to be sent to salesforce.com in the protect sfdc dialog.
• switch to OAuth for the login process
• write some unit tests, and look at automated end to end testing