💃 Send multiple requests with a single REST callout 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! With all of us being the top-notch Salesforce professionals that we are 💯, we all understand how critical integrations are within our system landscape.

Most of the time our attention gravitates toward outbound integrations - that is, how will Salesforce send/retrieve data to an external system. 🤔 

Today, however, let’s give some love to the inbound side of our integration projects! 💝 

Let’s take a peek at the Composite API … 👀 

Agenda for today includes

• Send multiple requests with a single REST callout

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Send multiple requests with a single REST callout

The mothership has provided a 💩-ton of ways to connect to the platform and execute business logic. But, sometimes it can get squirrelly 🐿️ orchestrating all that logic in a way that achieves the business goal in an efficient way.

Let’s look at an example for illustration purposes - suppose we have the following business requirement:

From a developer’s perspective, we can approach this may ways.

1️⃣ We can create a custom endpoint in Salesforce that will accept a JSON payload we can write code against to create the Accounts & Contacts in a single request. 🫠 

2️⃣ We can direct the .NET team to use standard endpoints and just split their operations across multiple requests. Meaning, first create the Account with a REST call, then use response from that request to assign the Contacts to the Account, followed by sending the Contact creation REST request. 😁 

3️⃣ Send both requests in a single call to the Salesforce Composite resource! 🔥 

Any of these options will work … technically speaking. But, if we want optimize this integration request and ensure the .NET team has a happy experience then we should seriously consider option #3️⃣ !

This is a standard endpoint that won’t require any of your Salesforce team’s bandwidth! 👍️👍️ 

So what is it? ⁉️ 

I’m glad you asked 🥰 

The Composite API allows developers to:

✅ Construct a payload that represents multiple requests, into a single REST call. 🤯 

✅ Use the output of one sub-request as the input of a subsequent sub-request inside the call. 🙌 

✅ Save on API limits! These count as a single API call call! 💃🕺 

Check out the following example payload (straight from the dev guide):

We see a single JSON object representing the payload we’re going to send to the Composite API. Denoted by the compositeRequest key at the beginning of the payload.

This compositeRequest is made up of an array (a collection) of sub-requests. These sub-requests are executed under the same user context and in the order they are defined in the payload. 👏👏 

Each sub-request contains:

☑️ method - identifies the CRUD operation to perform

☑️ url - denotes the resource we’re accessing

☑️ referenceId - designates the name of the variable holding the output data

☑️ body - body of that sub-request

Within the body of each you can reference variables holding the results of previously executed sub-requests! 🧠 

This is a super powerful endpoint the platform offers! The next time you hear a request about how to best insert related data into your Salesforce instance through a REST integration give this a serious look! 🤓 

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