Understanding APIs

A salient feature of Salesforce is that it takes an API-first approach. What that means is that Salesforce internal teams focus on building a rich set of functionalities into the API before designing and developing the user interface. The reason this is important is that it gives Salesforce customers the flexibility in using a custom-developed user interface should they desire. This is pretty common in Salesforce Experience Cloud where some customers tend to use the standard templates provided by Salesforce to provide a self-service experience to their customers and partners, whereas others build entirely custom frontends that are powered by Salesforce user interfaces.

Salesforce provides a variety of APIs meant for different purposes, such as manipulating page layouts, deploying code, querying Einstein Analytics data, or general-purpose APIs that are used to manipulate data. In this section, we will discuss the four main APIs that pertain to data manipulation...