Heroku for Advanced Salesforce Searching — Part 1 — Overview

Salesforce has some good mechanisms for querying data, however limitations on the platform become apparent when you want advanced query functions that have no equivalent in SOQL or SOSL.

For example, currently searching for ‘Joan Arp’ will yield one result from Global Search with a very close match:

I have built a simple proof of concept on the free-tier of Salesforce’s Heroku that will provide a greater range of approximate searches, with three different algorithms so far:

In order to build this you can see the source code with build instructions on GitHub here: https://github.com/andrewwhitten/Heroku-Salesforce-Search

The architecture is in effect extending your Salesforce system with Heroku to provide a fully functional search service based on:

• Heroku Postgres: Fully featured relational database with indexes and SQL
• Heroku Connect: Simple Salesforce data synchronization
• Heroku App: Hosts the search web service

Part 2 of this Article will cover the mechanics of the search, as well as how you can extend and optimize it for your scenarios.