Salesforce LinkedIn Integration Using OAuth

OAuth (Open Authorization) is an open standard for authorization. It allows users to share their private resources (e.g. photos, videos, contact lists) stored on one site with another site without having to hand out their credentials, typically username and password.OAuth allows users to hand out tokens instead of credentials to their data hosted by a given service provider. Each token grants access to a specific site (e.g. a video editing site) for specific resources (e.g. just videos from a specific album) and for a defined duration (e.g. the next 2 hours). This allows a user to grant a third party site access to their information stored with another service provider, without sharing their access permissions or the full extent of their data.OAuth is a service that is complementary to, but distinct from, OpenID.

Authorization: I have implemented the LinkedIn integration using OAuth in salesforce. To authorize linkedIn, we need the Consumer key and Consumer secret. These can be fetched from here.

For more details please click here.

Authorization Screen:

I have created a visualforce page in salesforce and added this page as an inline visualforce page on contact detail page. In my current implementation I am generating a linkedIn request by "FirstName, LastName and Company(Custom Field)". We can add some more parameters in the request.

Below is the example of a sample request.

http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people-search?company-name=metacube&keywords=devendra%2Fnatani

I have used the Http class to send request to linkedIn Api. After successful authorization we get the response in following format.

  
    
      8QRmNSsquG
      Devendra
      Natani
    
  
  1

Then I fetch the id tag value and generate a another request to fetch the public profile url of this id. I have used that url in the vf page which I have used as a inline vf page on contact detail page layout.

Thanks,