'API to retrieve contacts datas from SalesForce
From my app, I want to use SalesForce APIs to get datas about contacts (first/last name, mobile phone, email).
1/ is it free $ to use SalesForce APIs ?
2/ Where can I have access to the information about this specific API request ?
Many Thanks
Solution 1:[1]
"It depends"
You're paying for user license(s) already, in that sense the API requests are free. Accessing the Developer Edition / trailhead playground app is truly free. Then there are things like Essential Edition, Platform Edtion or whatever's the name - there's no API access in them out of the box. API is available in Enterprise, Unlimited etc. You need to check the edition you're planning to connect to.
And then... well, there are rolling 24h limits of API requests. Very forgiving in sandboxes, bit more strict in production (where they increase with every user license you buy or you can purhase extra "bandwidth")
It also depends how will you make these requests. Will you have 1 dedicated integration user or will every user of your web app log in to SF via your app and then you're piggybacking on them in a way (which is useful if your org has complex sharing rules for example and you need to be sure user sees in your app only the data they're allowed to see in core Salesforce).
Which brings us to how to connect. You have SOAP API and REST API. Depending on your programming language there are ready-made connectors for .NET, PHP, Python, Java... Regardless which you choose there will be at least 2 http calls needed. 1 to log in and get session id back, 1 to run actual query.
With SOAP API you pass username & password in login call, get XML message back with session id and endpoint (base url to use from now on). And then you'd query. SELECT FirstName, LastName, MobilePhone, Email FROM Contact or whatever you need.
With REST API there are more options, there's similar username-password flow but there are also more secure ways where your app never sees the user's password, user enters it on SF login screen and is redirected back to you. This is very good if you're making a web app or mobile app. You'd need to read up about all OAuth2 flows available.
Again - there's a chance you can say "don't care" and just use say https://pypi.org/project/simple-salesforce/
Sources
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Source: Stack Overflow
| Solution | Source |
|---|---|
| Solution 1 | eyescream |