Automated fetch of CSV from HTTP endpoint, Salesforce

[Nick Fenwick]

This is an awesome extension but cumbersome to import a new CSV file. Our database changes regularly and our non-technical staff using PII Viewer need an easy way to one-click update or simply have it auto update periodically. This is a two part enhancement request, one simple HTTP fetch, and another more complex Salesforce integration (but still basically HTTP operations).

Suggestions:

1. Configure a Data Feed of a simple HTTP GET to a user specified endpoint, e.g. https://www.ourcompany.com/LatestUsersCSV. Basic Auth would be a very useful addition to this, so the endpoint can be secured.
2. Configure a Data Feed of a fetch from Salesforce, which seems to be a case of knowing your client_id and client_secret along with server and knowing what endpoint to fetch from. You do a GET from SalesForce with these tokens to get an OAuth token, then make a GET to the endpoint you need to fetch using that OAuth token to get the data, probably in JSON format. We have a bunch of C# code that does this if sharing it would help.

Could we get the PII Viewer source to look at adding this ourselves? We know nothing about chrome extension development but if we can help we're happy to.

Nick

[David Simpson]

Hi @neek,

Interesting idea regarding the user specified endpoint. That could be useful. I could see a CSV being saved to a "secret place" in say Dropbox, then a re-sync button. My problem there would be the Chrome Extension permissions. You have to specify the website you require access to in the manifest.json file like so:

  ...
  "permissions": [
    "contextMenus",
    "http://www.google.com/analytics/*",
    "https://www.google.com/analytics/*",
    "https://*.mailchimp.com/*",  
    "storage"
  ],
  ...

That's likely to prove problematic. Specifically adding import from Dropbox would be achievable

With SalesForce, that's possible and perfectly achievable. I'm crazy busy at the moment though, so that's not something I'd add in the near term. I'm not willing to open-source the extension at this moment, but drop me a line at [e-mail] and we could discuss sharing the code-base privately. ;)

[Ali Yousuf]

@dvdsmpsn, instead of chrome extension fetching CSV data directly from a custom URL, you could also create a custom service which would fetch the data from custom URLs.

For example, if a user wants data from www.example.com/users.csv, the chrome extension would request data from www.dvdsmpsn.com/fetch_csv?url=www.example.com/users.csv

That would be a lot of work for you, but it will be very easy for everyone.