Lightning Platform Data APIs

There are 11 APIs available on the Salesforce Lightning Platform that cover all sorts of operations, including working with metadata (the Metadata API), building user interfaces that let users interact with Salesforce records (the User Interface API), and for use when building custom development modules or applications (the Tooling API).

I appreciate that not everyone reading this book will be a software engineer and therefore understand the intricacies of how APIs work. However, understanding how Salesforce programmatically exposes data-related operations is necessary. This will give you a more complete understanding of how data can be affected by operations on the Salesforce platform outside of general user interface interaction.

In a nutshell, an API provides a means by which two software applications can talk to each other. Typically, one of the applications exposes a select set of operations that other applications can invoke. APIs also support...