How to Make a Salesforce REST API Call from Postman

Postman is a popular API testing tool that allows developers and testers to easily create, test and share API calls. With Postman, you can make REST API calls to Salesforce without having to write any code.

Using a combination of the Postman console, request parameters, headers, and body data you can send your own custom requests to the Salesforce API and get back meaningful responses.

Steps:

1) Set up your environment: 

Before making an API call with Postman, it’s important to set up your environment by creating variables for authentication credentials as well as setting up an endpoint URL that will be used in subsequent requests. This will make it easier for you to reuse values across multiple requests. 

2) Get an access token: 

Before you can make requests to the Salesforce API, you must first obtain an access token. You can use Postman’s OAuth 2.0 authorization helper to do this quickly and easily. Simply enter your client ID and secret, select “OAuth 2.0” as the type of authorization, hit send and you’ll receive an access token in the response body.

3) Construct your request URL: 

Once you have your access token, construct a request URL that contains all of the necessary information for making a call to the Salesforce API. This includes the object name (e.g., ‘Account’), fields that should be included in the response (e.g., ‘Name,’ ‘Phone’), and any other parameters that may be necessary.

4) Send your request: 

Now you are ready to make your API call. Use Postman’s POST method to send the request URL along with the previously obtained access token in the authorization header. If successful, you will receive a response with the requested data in the body of the response.

5) Parse your response: 

Finally, you can parse your response and use that data for whatever purpose you may need. For example, you could use it to populate a dashboard or store it in a database for further analysis.

Postman is a popular API client that makes it easy to make Restful API calls from the command line. With Postman, you can easily construct complex HTTP requests quickly, organizing them in collections for reuse and sharing with colleagues. It allows users to integrate any data source into their workflow, making it simple to access Salesforce REST API calls. 

In this tutorial, we will discuss how to make a Salesforce API call from Postman and how to set up authentication. 

Steps: 

1. Install the latest version of Postman on your computer (it’s available for both Mac and Windows). 
2. Sign up for a Salesforce developer account if you don’t already have one using this link: https://developer.salesforce.com/signup 
3. Log into your Salesforce account and head to the Setup page (found in the top right corner). 
4. Click on “Develop” > “REST API”. This will display the REST API documentation for your org, which includes authentication details and endpoints. 
5. Take note of the Consumer Key and Consumer Secret values as you’ll need these later when configuring Postman. 
6. Now open up Postman and click on the “Authorization” tab located at the right-hand side of the window. Select OAuth 2 from the Type dropdown menu and then enter the Client ID and Client Secret that were obtained from Salesforce in step 5. 
7. Click the “Get New Access Token” button and fill in the required fields such as token name, grant type, callback URL, authorization URL. The Callback URL should be the same one that you used to obtain the Client ID and Client Secret in step 5. 
8. Once all of the details have been entered correctly, click the “Request Token” button to initiate the process of obtaining an access token. 
9. Finally, once you have received an access token from Salesforce, you can use it to make API calls by adding it to your requests under Headers or Query Params depending on what method you are using (GET/POST etc). 

Conclusion:

In this tutorial, we’ve discussed how to make a Salesforce API call from Postman. We started off by obtaining our authentication details from Salesforce, followed by setting up the authorization in Postman and finally making our API calls. With this tutorial, you should now have a better understanding of how to use Postman for making Salesforce API calls.