
Salesforce Data Architect Certification Guide
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While the design and implementation of APIs is out of the scope of this book, we’ll briefly cover how to call an API, namely the Salesforce REST API. At a high-level, an API is essentially a request to an endpoint (a URL) with an XML or JSON body (known as the request payload). The endpoint will return a response payload, which may be XML or JSON depending on how it is configured.
Let’s cover what calling a REST API looks like, and examine the request and response payloads as we do. For this, we’re going to use an online utility called Workbench, which is a free-to-use web application for interacting with your Salesforce instance. Note that it is not an official Salesforce product, and therefore support is limited.
To begin, open a web browser and navigate to the URL https://workbench.developerforce.com/login.php
Next, click the checkbox to agree to the terms and conditions, and click the Login with Salesforce button: