Salesforce API Call Basics

A Salesforce API call represents specific operations. Salesforce API call basics set up your client applications to invoke at runtime to perform tasks, for example:

Query data in your organization.
Add, update, and delete data.
Obtain metadata about your data.
Run utilities to perform administration tasks.

Using your development environment, you can construct Web service client applications that use standard Web service protocols to programmatically:

Log in to the login server (login()) and receive authentication information to be used for subsequent calls
Query your organization’s information (query(), queryAll(), queryMore(), and retrieve() calls)
Perform text searches across your organization’s information (search() call)
Create, update, and delete data (create(), merge(), update(), upsert(), delete(), and undelete() calls)
Perform administrative tasks, such as retrieving user information (getUserInfo() call), changing passwords (setPassword() and resetPassword() calls), and getting the system time (getServerTimestamp() call)
Replicate data locally (getDeleted() and getUpdated() calls)
Obtain and navigate metadata about your organization’s data (describeGlobal(), describeSObject(), describeSObjects(), describeLayout(), and describeTabs() calls)
Work with approval processes (process())
Return category groups and categories from your organization (describeDataCategoryGroups() and describeDataCategoryGroupStructures()).

Learn more about Salesforce API call basics. A Salesforce API call is a powerful tool.