How to get notified of a new lead in SalesForce? [closed]

Question

I want to get notified when a new lead is created in Salesforce. Is there something like webhook in Salesforce or some other way to achieve this?

Answer 1

Yes, plenty of options :)

For Salesforce as actor:

1. Workflow rule that would fire on insert of Lead and send you an email (or if it's for system integration - outbound message).
2. You can always write an "after insert" Apex trigger and have in it a callout to external system (SOAP and RESTful APIs are supported). Although you'll need a @future annotation because the triggers by default aren't supposed to send callouts (the database commit/rollback shouldn't depend on whether the external system has accepted the message or not).

For external system as actor:

1. Simply poll every once in a while for something like [SELECT Id FROM Lead WHERE CreatedDate > :lastTimeIhaveChecked]
2. Or there's fairly recent addition called Streaming API. Basically you define a PushTopic (query that interests you). Salesforce peeks at the current results returned by it and whenever the results change you'll get a notification. I haven't played with it yet but seems from the docs you can set event type to show "created" events only. This might be closest to a webhook.

Answer 2

I hate to self-promote but since some might fine this as a useful answer... I built a Webhook creator for Salesforce. It is open source: https://github.com/jamesward/salesforce-webhook-creator