JTD-DesignerSeries-10-SFDC-API-101

Saleforce APIs

Data in Salesforce Ecosystem is organized in the form of Objects & Relationship and Object Manager is a handy tool that allows you to view the object structure & fields. Salesforce Platform, though along with providing ease of use platform tools to design these structures manages the metadata & API access point for each definition which allows apps to connect with data & metadata without worrying about underlying connectivity protocols.

At the data layer, there are SOAP, REST, BULK & STREAMING APIs. Platform also provides Metadata & User Interface API at customization layer.

Data APIs

SOAP API - Webservice communication over SOAP/XML has been a standard way of system integration in an enterprise ecosystem over the last decade. An API is defined with a WSDL document, and platform allows to generate a strongly typed enterprise wsdl [support single org] / or partner wsdl which is loosely typed [can support multiple orgs].

REST API - Mobile Apps & Resposive Web UIs has exploited the potential of widely accepted HTTP protocol & omni presence of http infrastructure and allows applications to make its features, functions & data accessible over the internet through Restful layer supporting mime-types [application/json, application/xml]

Bulk API - When working with large datasets, it helps to divide the dataset in batches & create multiple asynchronous & parallel jobs to process the divided batches. In contrariety to the SOAP & REST API, which are synchronous, Bulk API uses the asynchronous framework of Jobs & Statuses to process large data sets.

Streaming API - Another way of enabling asynchronous behavior is by pushing a stream of notifications & there can multiple client apps subscribing to these notifications. Developers can use Push Topic to subscribe to events that are tied to salesforce records, and can also implement publish subscribe pattern of custom notifications with platform events.