Hi everyone,

I recently worked on integrating Salesforce REST APIs with OutSystems. In this post, I would like to share the approach I followed to authenticate with Salesforce and perform CRUD operations on the Salesforce Account object.

1. Integration Flow

The overall flow is:

The Access Token generated from Salesforce is then used in the Authorization header for the subsequent API calls.

2. Generate Salesforce Access Token

First, I created a REST API method in OutSystems for the Salesforce OAuth endpoint.

Method

Endpoint

Header

Request Body

The response contains the access token, which is stored in an OutSystems variable and used for the other Salesforce API calls.

For a real project, client credentials should not be hardcoded. They should be stored securely, for example using appropriate OutSystems configuration/secret management.

3. Authorization for Salesforce APIs

For the Account APIs, I used the access token generated in the previous step.

4. GET Account

For retrieving Account records, I created a REST API method using:

Example endpoint:

In OutSystems, AccountId is configured as an input parameter and passed to the REST API dynamically.

5. Create Account

To create an Account, I used the Salesforce Account endpoint:

In OutSystems, I created a structure representing the Account request and passed it as the request body.

The structure can contain fields such as:

Salesforce returns the newly created Account ID in the response.

6. Update Account

For updating an existing Account, I used:

Only the fields that need to be updated need to be included in the request.

7. Delete Account

For deleting an Account, I used:

Instead of hardcoding the Account ID, I configured it as an input parameter in OutSystems.

Server Action

I created a Server Action with:

No request body is required for the DELETE operation.

8. Suggested OutSystems Structure

I organized the Salesforce integration approximately like this:

The business logic can then call these REST methods through Server Actions.

For example:

9. Important Points

A few things that I found important during the integration:

1. Do not hardcode Salesforce Record IDs.Pass them as dynamic input parameters.

2. Use the correct Content-Type.

   • OAuth token request → application/x-www-form-urlencoded

   • Salesforce CRUD requests with JSON → application/json

3. Use the Access Token in the Authorization header:

For POST, use POST to create a record.

4. For PATCH, use PATCH to update an existing record.

5. For DELETE, use DELETE and pass the record ID in the URL.

6. Keep Salesforce credentials and secrets secure and avoid exposing them in client-side logic or source code.

10. Final Flow

The complete integration flow is:

This approach allowed me to perform Create, Read, Update, and Delete operations on Salesforce Account records from OutSystems using Salesforce REST APIs.