External Services provide a seamless way to integrate external functionality into your Salesforce workflows without writing custom code. This blog will help you understand How to register an External Service in Salesforce. Let’s break down the process of using Salesforce’s External Services to integrate an external web service into your Salesforce environment.
- External Web Service Provider and REST-based API:
- An external web service provider (like a bank) hosts its REST-based API.
- Sharing the API Spec:
- The web service provider or a developer shares a JSON-based API specification that describes the API’s operations.
- Creating an External Credential and Named Credential:
- A Salesforce administrator or developer declaratively creates an external credential and named credential within Salesforce.
- An external credential defines the authentication protocol and permissions needed to connect to an external system.
- Named credentials act as endpoints for callouts from Salesforce to external services. This is used to authenticate the web service endpoint to which we are making the call.
- The endpoint is the URL of the REST-based API provided by the external web service.
- You can create these from the Set up.
4. Registering the Web Service:
- The Salesforce admin registers the external web service using both the named credential and the API spec.
- External Services imports the API spec’s operations into your Salesforce org.
- When the External Service is registered, these operations will become available as invocable actions within your Salesforce which can be later used in flows.
- To register a new External Service, navigate to External Services in Set up menu.
- Click the “New External Service” button.
- On the “Select an API Source” page, choose the option based on your use case
- If you’re importing an API spec from MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, select that option , otherwise choose “From API Specification.”
- Provide Registration Details
- Under “Select a Named Credential,” choose an existing named credential from the list.
- This named credential contains authentication details for outbound requests.
- Choose “Relative URL” under “Service Schema.”
- Once the schema validation is successful, select the operations to perform during call out.
- Review the actions available for the flow which is to be built in the next step.
5. Using Flow Builder:
- Use Flow Builder to create a flow to access these invocable flow actions.
- These actions allow you to automate processes and interact with the external web service declaratively.
6. Runtime Interaction:
- During runtime, a flow sends a callout to the web service endpoint.
- The web service processes the request based on the API spec.
- Data can be retrieved, created, updated, or deleted by the external web service.
- Salesforce captures the responses from the external web service, making them available for use within tools like Flow Builder.
In this article we learned How to register an External Service in Salesforce.
To learn more, click Submit an API Spec With a Relative URL (salesforce.com)
Take Five Consulting is a technology company, based in Virginia U.S., that specializes in the Mortgage Banking vertical especially LOS implementation and application development. Take Five Consulting creates and implement mortgage technology and software specifically for Mortgage Industry.
