Here is our Open Source project on Github after some digging into Eloqua documentation and building some docker files. Take a couple of minutes and read the entire story.
Some time ago… the story of building an Eloqua App begins. First, Bogdan (one of my colleagues) starts to investigate what can be done and after digging and digging in the old and new documentation he realizes what it’s possible. After 2 weeks of building and debugging the first version of our Eloqua App appears.
Our Eloqua App is a service meant to provide a small box in a campaign which can receive a list of contacts from the campaign and deliver emails with a form with their data. We are using Eloqua to create different Marketing Campaigns and in case you are not familiar with it you can have a look at the official Oracle Page.
To be able to do this we needed to build a Node Service with Express (it could be any type of REST service) which can serve the needed Endpoints:
-
Create - the endpoint is called when the App is initialized, and this is happening when the marketer drags the app box into the campaign
-
Configure - is called when the marketer chooses to configure the app by double clocking the App box in the campaign. This Endpoint delivers some HTML to make the configuration possible.
-
Notify - is called automatically by Eloqua when the campaign is active and the list of contacts ends up into the App box
-
Delete - is called when the App is deleted from the campaign
And back to the story now… we deployed the App in Azure, and we started using it in a campaign. Some weeks after, Eloqua changes the API and some static fields which were configured in the needed form where not appearing anymore.
Here I enter into the story and start investigating; it looks like Eloqua does not offer the possibility to store other fields than the ones attached to an Eloqua entity anymore. Having this problem to solve I added a Mongodb with Mongoose to the project and saved the needed fields there. Doing this I realized that we can improve our code and instead of using the old callbacks I switched to promises.
I built also some Docker scripts to have the app containerized and made everything opened source.
On Github you can find the Server, the docker containers and a Readme file which explains everything we learned from building this App.
Enjoy! and Happy cloning!