About SOAP API

The Lightning Platform allows you to customize, integrate, and extend your Salesforce organization using the language and platform of your choice:

• Customize Salesforce with custom fields, links, objects, page layouts, buttons, record types, s-controls, and tabs to meet specific business requirements.
• Integrate Salesforce with your org’s ERP and finance systems. Deliver real-time sales and support information to company portals and populate critical business systems with customer information.
• Extend Salesforce in presentation, business logic, and data services with new functionality that reflects the business requirements of your org.

For more information about Lightning Platform solutions and developer resources, go to Salesforce Developers.

To use SOAP API, your org must use Enterprise Edition, Performance Edition, Unlimited Edition, or Developer Edition. If you’re an existing Salesforce customer and want to upgrade to Enterprise, Unlimited, or Performance Edition, contact your account representative.

To protect the configuration and live data in your production org, we recommend building and testing all solutions and changes in an isolated environment, such as a Developer Edition, sandbox, or scratch org.

Developer Edition provides access to all features available with Enterprise Edition, but is constrained by the number of users and the amount of storage space in each org. Sign up for a free Developer Edition. Sandboxes create copies of your existing org into separate environments. For more information, see Sandboxes: Staging Environments for Customizing and Testing. A scratch org is a source-driven and disposable deployment that’s fully configurable, allowing you to emulate different Salesforce editions with different features and preferences. For more information, see Scratch Orgs

In all supported editions, a user must have the API Enabled permission turned on in the user profile they’re assigned. This permission is enabled by default on some profiles, including many profiles available in Developer Edition orgs. In supported editions, you can also use the Salesforce Integration user license to grant system-to-system integration users org access while limiting them to API-only operations. For more information, see Salesforce Help: Give Integration Users API Only Access.

SOAP API is implemented to comply with the following specifications:

SOAP API works with current SOAP development environments, including, but not limited to, Visual Studio .NET 2005. In this document, we provide examples in Java and C# (.NET). The Java examples are based on WSC 20.0 (WSC) and JDK 6 (Java Platform Standard Edition Development Kit 6). Other versions of WSC are available at https://github.com/forcedotcom/wsc and https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.force.api/force-wsc. To see a complete list of compatible development platforms and more sample code, go to developer.salesforce.com.

Salesforce recommends that your new client applications use the most recent version of the Lightning Platform WSDL file to fully exploit the benefits of richer features and greater efficiency. You can navigate to the most recent WSDL for your organization from Setup by entering API in the Quick Find box, then selecting API. When a new version is released, use the following steps in Quick Start to update your WSDL:

• Regenerate the WSDL file (see Step 2: Generate or Obtain the Web Service WSDL)
• Import it into your environment (see Step 3: Import the WSDL File Into Your Development Platform)

There are two Lightning Platform Web services for which you can obtain WSDL files for API access:

• Lightning Platform Enterprise WSDL—This API is for most enterprise users who are developing client applications for their org. The enterprise WSDL file is a strongly typed representation of your org’s data. It provides information about your schema, data types, and fields to your development environment, allowing for a tighter integration between it and the Lightning Platform Web service. This WSDL changes if custom fields or custom objects are added to, renamed, or removed from, your org’s Salesforce configuration. If you are downloading an enterprise WSDL and you have managed packages installed in your organization, you need to take an extra step to select the version of each installed package to include in the generated WSDL.
  Note the following when generating the enterprise WSDL:

  • If new custom fields or objects are added to, renamed, or removed from your org’s information, you must regenerate the WSDL file to access them.
  • The generated WSDL contains the objects and fields in your org, including those available in the selected versions of each installed package. If a field or object is added in a later package version, you must generate the enterprise WSDL with that package version to work with the object or field in your API integration.
• Lightning Platform Partner WSDL—This API is for Salesforce partners who are developing client applications for multiple orgs. As a loosely-typed representation of the Salesforce object model, the partner WSDL can be used to access data within any org.

The Salesforce developer website provides a full suite of developer toolkits, sample code, sample SOAP messages, community-based support, and other resources to help you with your development projects. Be sure to visit developer.salesforce.com for more information, or visit developer.salesforce.com/signup to sign up for a free Developer Edition account.

You can visit these websites to find out more about Salesforce applications:

• Salesforce for information about the Salesforce application.
• Salesforce AppExchange for access to apps created for Salesforce.
• Trailblazer Community for services to ensure Salesforce customer success.