Outbound Integrations – SOAP

In the previous chapter, we looked at how we can integrate our Salesforce instance with externally hosted web-based applications that provide a RESTful API. As discussed, RESTful APIs are the de facto standard for many web-based applications due to their small payloads and simple integration with mobile devices. For larger enterprise applications, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is still widely used as it provides better handling of stateful applications, standardization across such large systems, and security.

In this chapter, we are going to discuss the following:

• Why you might want to work with a SOAP API through an overview of SOAP
• Implementing an integration using SOAP in Apex
• Exploring WSDL files
• Understanding testing callouts

Let us start by reviewing what SOAP is.