Salesforce Integration with Google Calendar | All You Need to Know

Salesforce is a popular Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform that businesses use to manage their sales, marketing, and customer support activities. Salesforce provides various integration options that allow businesses to connect their Salesforce data with other third-party applications to streamline their workflows and automate business processes. Google Calendar is a popular cloud-based calendar application that allows users to schedule and manage their events and tasks. In this blog, we will explore how Salesforce can be integrated with Google Calendar using the REST API callout. 

What is the Rest API Protocol?

REST API is a widely used protocol for web-based integrations that allows two applications to communicate with each other using HTTP requests and responses. Google Calendar provides a REST API that allows developers to access and manipulate calendar data programmatically. Salesforce also provides a similar REST API that developers can use to access and manipulate Salesforce data from external applications. 

How to Integrate Salesforce with Google Calendar?

To integrate Salesforce with Google Calendar, we need to create a custom Salesforce application that uses the Salesforce REST API to retrieve and update Salesforce data and uses the Google Calendar API to retrieve and update calendar data. The integration can be achieved by creating an Apex class that makes REST API callouts to Google Calendar API endpoints to create, read, update, and delete calendar events. 

To create a custom Salesforce application, we need to create a Connected App in Salesforce and authorize it to access the Google Calendar API. We also need to obtain the OAuth 2.0 credentials for the Google Calendar API and configure them in Salesforce. Once the authorization and configuration are complete, we can start building the integration using Apex. 

Don't forget to check out: Integrations in Salesforce | All You Need to Know

To make a REST API callout from Apex, we use the Http class that allows us to send HTTP requests and receive HTTP responses. The Http class provides various methods to perform different HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. To make a REST API callout to Google Calendar API, we need to construct an HTTP request with the required headers and body parameters and use the Http class to send the request. 

For example, to create a new calendar event in Google Calendar, we can use the following Apex code: 

string data = '{"end": {"date": "'+EventEndDate+'"},"start": {"date": "'+EventStartDate+'"},"summary": "'+EventName+'"}';
request = new HttpRequest();
request.setEndpoint('https://www.googleapis.com/calendar/v3/calendars/primary/events?key=AIzaSyCZjS5xwTXfuRo0N-yv9kDeYcAyGvhFd1Q');
request.setMethod('POST');
request.setHeader('Authorization', 'Bearer '+accessToken);
request.setHeader('Accept', 'application/json');
request.setHeader('Content-Type', 'application/json;charset=UTF-8');
request.setBody(data);
response = http.send(request);
system.debug(response.getbody());

In this code, we first create an instance of the Http class and an instance of the HttpRequest class. We set the endpoint URL to the Google Calendar API endpoint for creating events and set the HTTP method to POST. We then set the required headers for the HTTP request, including the Authorization header that contains the access token obtained from the Google Calendar API. We also set the Content-Type header to indicate that the request body contains JSON data. Finally, we construct the request body as a JSON string that contains the event details and set it as the request body. We then use the Http class to send the request and receive the HTTP response. 

Similarly, we can use the Http class to make REST API callouts to retrieve, update, and delete calendar events in Google Calendar. 

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In conclusion, integrating Salesforce with Google Calendar using REST API callout allows businesses to automate their scheduling and calendar management processes and ensure that all events and tasks are synchronized across all platforms.