Another problem we often face when integrating with other systems is formatting phone numbers. If you enter a phone number via the SFDC UI, it will apply standard US phone formatting to the number if it a 10 digits number. But that is being applied by the browser using JS script. If you load data into phone number fields via the API, it leaves them as they are, which doesn’t look great when a user sees the record in the UI, and it can break any phone integrations such as Skype or Google Voice that expect numbers to be formatted in a certain way.

To get round that problem, we can use another utility with a simple REGEX pattern:

public static String formatphonenumber(String cphone) {
String fphone = cphone.replaceAll('\\D','');

This one will look at the original string passed to it, remove any character that is not a digit, and if it is 10 digits long, apply the US style phone format to it to make it consistent with the UI formatted numbers.
So if we can do something like this:

String sPhoneRaw = '202-555-1234';
String sPhoneFormatted = UtilitiesDemo.formatphonenumber (sPhoneRaw);
system.assertequals('(202) 555-1234', sPhoneFormatted);


The key line is this one:

String fphone = cphone.replaceAll('\\D','');

replaceall is a standard string function in APEX, but it can use a REGEX as the pattern to search for – in this case, an NON digit. So it doesn’t matter what we get passed from another system/loaded in via the API – we can strip it back to just the digits, and then apply the format if required.

And you can see a working demo here

If you enter an email address into an ’email’ type field in Force.com, it will validate that the value entered is a valid email, and won’t let you save the record with a bad email. But when you are integrating Salesforce with another system, that system may not perform the same level of verification. You often need to import the record into Salesforce regardless of whether the email is valid, but need to be able to handle bad emails so you don’t try and save a record with a bad email address.

So I always create a static method in a Utility class that I can use to check an email and return a boolean to tell me if the email is valid or not. If not, I can then save the email address to a non-email text field, and flag the record for review by a business user. The method uses a pattern match with a REGEX for matching against emails. I have always used the example from this post. But if you search for Email and Regex, you’ll find lots of examples. The one below seems to handle most scenarios though.


public static Boolean checkEmail (String semail) {
String InputString = semail;
String emailRegex = '([a-zA-Z0-9_\\-\\.]+)@((\\[a-z]{1,3}\\.[a-z]{1,3}\\.[a-z]{1,3}\\.)|(([a-zA-Z0-9\\-]+\\.)+))([a-zA-Z]{2,4}|[0-9]{1,3})';
Pattern MyPattern = Pattern.compile(emailRegex);

if (!MyMatcher.matches()) {
return FALSE;
}
else {
return TRUE;
}
} //end email check

And then in my integration code, a simple check

if (UtilitiesDemo.checkEmail (sEmail) ) {
//Use email
}
else {
handle bad email
}

You can see a working example here

Next up, formatting phone numbers from another system…