Connect to Salesforce Marketing Data in Ruby

The CData ODBC Driver for Salesforce Marketing Cloud makes it easy to integrate connectivity to live Salesforce Marketing data in Ruby. This article shows how to create a simple Ruby app that connects to Salesforce Marketing data, executes a query, and displays the results.

Create an ODBC Connection to Salesforce Marketing Data

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Authenticating to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud APIs

Set the and to your login credentials, or to the credentials for a sandbox user if you are connecting to a sandbox account.

Connecting to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud APIs

By default, the data provider connects to production environments. Set to true to use a Salesforce Marketing Cloud sandbox account.

The default Instance is s7 of the Web Services API; however, if you use a different instance, you can set .

Installing Ruby and Necessary Gems

If you do not have Ruby installed, refer to the Ruby installation page. With Ruby installed, you will need to install the ruby-dbi, dbd-odbc, and ruby-odbc gems:

gem install dbi
gem install dbd-odbc
gem install ruby-odbc

Create a Ruby App with Connectivity to Salesforce Marketing Data

Create a new Ruby file (for example: SFMarketingCloudSelect.rb) and open it in a text editor. Copy the following code into your file:

#connect to the DSN
require 'dbi'
cnxn = DBI.connect('DBI:ODBC:CData SFMarketingCloud Source','','')

#execute a SELECT query and store the result set
resultSet = cnxn.execute("SELECT Id, Status FROM Subscriber")

#display the names of the columns
resultSet.column_names.each do |name|
 print name, "\t"
end
puts

#display the results
while row = resultSet.fetch do
 (0..resultSet.column_names.size - 1).each do |n|
 print row[n], "\t"
 end
 puts
end
resultSet.finish

#close the connection
cnxn.disconnect if cnxn

With the file completed, you are ready to display your Salesforce Marketing data with Ruby. To do so, simply run your file from the command line:

ruby SFMarketingCloudSelect.rb

Writing SQL-92 queries to Salesforce Marketing allows you to quickly and easily incorporate Salesforce Marketing data into your own Ruby applications. Download a free trial today!