An overview of Salesforce APIs

Financials and Salesforce REST APIs

Financials (formerly Sage Live) is a web application built on the Force.com platform developed by Salesforce. As a result, you can use the REST APIs provided by Salesforce to manipulate data in Financials and integrate with other applications and websites.

NOTE: Before you start, we recommend that you read about the key concepts of Financials and Salesforce REST APIs. For more information, see Learning resources.

Using the Salesforce REST APIs, you can programmatically create, retrieve, update, and delete data in Financials. To do so, you need to send an HTTP request to a REST resource exposed via the REST APIs and parse the HTTP response.

Each REST resource represents a specific object. These objects can be specific to Financials or general objects also used by Salesforce. This allows you to manipulate that object through the REST APIs. You can access a REST resource via its URL path using standard HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE). An HTTP method specifies what you want to do with the REST resource, such as create, retrieve, update, or delete.

The use of HTTP makes the REST APIs programming language agnostic, because to send an HTTP request and parse the response you can use any modern programming language and development platform.

Before sending an HTTP request via a REST API, you must authenticate with the API. Financials relies on the authentication mechanism implemented in the Force.com platform. For details, see Understanding Authentication in the Force.com REST API Developer Guide.

To work with data in Financials, you can use the following Salesforce REST APIs.

Force.com REST API

The Force.com REST API allows you to access and manipulate one Financials resource in a single HTTP call. For details about the Financials resources you can work with via this API, see API reference.

Composite REST API

This API allows you to run a series of REST API requests using a single HTTP call. All requests in an HTTP call are counted as a single call against your API limits. The Composite REST API returns a single HTTP response and status for all the requests executed in a single call. This means that if one request in your call fails, the entire call also fails. The Financials resources you can access via the Composite REST API are the same as those exposed via the Force.com REST API.

Bulk REST API

The Bulk REST API is designed to work with large data sets. With this API, you can asynchronously create, delete, or update hundreds of thousands or millions of records in Financials.

For details, see:

Available REST resources

To work with Financials, you can use the following resources exposed via the Salesforce REST APIs: