Introduction to External Services

As an Admin, do you feel intimidated by hearing words like Integration and APIs? Well, that’s about to change.

Integrations and APIs are no longer just for developers. The landscape is changing and ‘External Services’ is one of those Salesforce features which is intended to give more power to the Salesforce Admins to help them integrate external APIs with minimal code.

And even as a developer, writing code for even the simplest of integrations between Salesforce and external systems can be time consuming process. From handling Auth to defining callouts to writing tedious Unit tests and then finally maintaining the code base! *too much work* 🤯

With the rising popularity of low code tools, not just within Salesforce ecosystem but outside as well, it’s good to have knowledge about these tools because someday or the other you will find yourself using these tools.

Pretty sure, you’re already familiar with Flows in Salesforce. A very powerful low code tool to set up even the complex business automation. But what if your automation logic involves calling third party API(s), in other words, integrating with external systems.

So far yet, to address problems related to integration, we didn’t have much options but to write some Apex, even for the simplest ones. But now you do.

Meet ‘External Services‘, a low code feature within Salesforce that leverages declarative tools to connect to an external systems. External Services efficiently tackles all the pain points of programmatic integrations.

• Authentication is handled by Named Credentials like a pro

• External Services auto generated Apex actions(for making callouts) based on the registered swagger schema.

• No need to write tests, easy deployment. But, I’d strongly recommend writing tests.

• Can be easily maintained by Admins. (Easily? Debatable. Will address it in my future posts)

To get started with External Services, complete this Trailhead module. https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/external-services

In my future posts on External Services, we will address the lesser explained concepts around this feature(Swagger Schema, Authentication with APIs etc.) along with some ‘How to’ examples.

Hope this was a fun read for you! Catch you in the next one! ✌🏻 And thank you for being an awesome reader! Subscribe to this blog for receiving all the latest updates straight to your inbox. 🙂