Environmental Overview

The main components in the system can be seen in the following diagram:

Architecture Detail

• Salesforce: Contains your critical data in native and custom objects.
• Local Windows server or cloud based Virtual Machine running IIS: Hosts the SDDMS application and, depending on the requirements, the SQL Server database and IIS website. SDDMS encapsulates the SQL Server and website generation code. It also hosts G4S, an ASP.NET to Salesforce integration connector. 
• SQL Server: An instance of SQL Server stores the Salesforce data. It can be located adjacent to the SDDMS application or on another server altogether.
• ASP.NET Backup Website: This website runs in IIS. It can be located on the local server. 

The data export zip files containing the CSV Data Files are exported from Salesforce and stored in a known location on the file system.

Architecture Overview

The fundamental process for extracting data from Salesforce is as follows (referencing the above image): 

1. A Salesforce administrator uses the Data Export tool to schedule (or regularly schedule) a data export. The Data Export functionality can be seen in Salesforce at Setup >> Administration Setup >> Data Management >> Data Export.
2. On a provisioned Windows server, a command line executable is run from a scheduled task. SDDMS will then pull the data export files and schema from Salesforce.
3. Generation options include building a SQL Server database and subsequently generating a website form the database tables. Option selection is via the command line parameter or configuration file settings.
4. If database generation is required, a process will create a SQL Server database and load the data into the new database. This includes the binaries of any documents or attachments.
5. If SDDMS is configured to build a website, a new ASP.NET web application will be created that exposes the SQL Server data for create, read, update and delete (CRUD) operations. An email notification of the generation result and log messages will be sent to the nominated administrator.

Note:  A single server or multi server set up can be used through this process.