Salesforce form integration (web-to-lead) with PHP and cURL

Salesforce has an out of the box solution for generating leads from online forms called web-to-lead, this solution is very basic and in my opinion very insecure. A small amount of Redwood's forms require a submission of data to a database as well as sending the data to Salesforce, the basic web-to-lead forms can't handle this. The solution is to POST the data to a submission page, submit the data and then "POST" the data on to Salesforce.

After many hours research I found cURL (Client URL Library) to be the best solution for posting data on from a standard page. In order to use PHP's cURL functions you need to install the libcurl package.

In the example below I am only showing the basic process. I am leaving out the validation code for the fields and any submission code to MySQL database.

One security advantage of this process is hiding your organisation id within a variable in the submission page rather than on the live page with the form.

// SF Org Id.
$oid = "0113543434646";

I first check if cURL is enabled before processing any further.

// Make sure cURL is enabled
if (!function_exists('curl_init')) {
	error("Curl is not setup on this PHP server and is 
    required for this script");
}

I then loop through all the data input from the form. I first check there is data there (twice). Then I loop through each POST data using a foreach. Within the foreach loop I run stripslashes() function to stop the backslashes getting added twice. I don’t do any other form of validation as the data is going to Salesforce and I rely on them checking the data. At the end I add the organisation to the array.

if (isset($_POST)) {
	
if (count($_POST) == 0) exit("Error.  No data was passed
     to this script.");
	
// variable to hold cleaned up a version of $_POST data
$cleanPOST = array();	

// Loop through the $_POST data and process it
foreach ($_POST as $key=>$value){
 $cleanPOST[stripslashes($key)] = stripslashes($value);
}

// Add the Org ID
$cleanPOST["oid"] = $oid;
		
	
} else {
 exit("Error.  No data was passed to this script.");
}

Once the POST data is in an array we can send it to Salesforce. I have commented each step below. I add a return URL to the data sent which then redirects the user to that URL. You could do the redirect in the PHP file itself.

// Create a new cURL resource
$ch = curl_init();	

if (curl_error($ch) != "") {
    echo "Error: $error\n";
}
		
// Point to the Salesforce Web to Lead page
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 
"http://www.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.WebToLead");
		
// Set the method to POST
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
		
// Pass POST data
curl_setopt(
$ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($cleanPOST));
		
curl_exec($ch); // Post to Salesforce
curl_close($ch); // close cURL resource

Published 20.08.08