Salesforce API How to identify a Case from an email reference code Ref Ref

Question

1

I'm writing a Windows service that will poll my IMAP4 inbox for emails from clients and create new Cases in Salesforce based on them.

Sometimes emails come in with a Case reference code in the subject. Ex: "[ ref:00FFwxyz.500FFJJS5:ref ]". I'd like to assign such emails to the existing Case identified by the code rather than create a new one.

My questions is: Is there a definitive formula for extracting a unique Case identifier from the ref code? 

Answer 1

My solution is to create a new custom field on the Case record of type "Formula (Text)". The field's value is the formula mentioned in the blog post:

TRIM(" [ ref:" + LEFT( $Organization.Id, 4) + RIGHT($Organization.Id, 4) +"."+ LEFT( Id, 4) + SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(Id, RIGHT( Id, 4), ""), LEFT( Id, 4), ""), "0", "") + RIGHT( Id, 4) + ":ref ] ")

Now the value of the custom field for each Case record is the same as the reference Id in emails and I can simply query for it with the Salesforce API.