This tutorial explains how you can connect API data into OData for use with Salesforce Lightning Connect.
The Growth of Enterprise and Internal APIs
The landscape of your data is growing rapidly. More and more, businesses are creating, storing and accessing enterprise data in a wide variety of cloud and on-premises endpoints. According to ProgrammableWeb, there are more than 20,000 public APIs in use today. Despite this vast number, there are many multiples more private APIs in use by businesses on a daily basis. It can be a challenge to ensure that the data from these varied sources is accessible to your critical business platforms. This can be made even more challenging by the fact that businesses are responsible for keeping these internal APIs up and running—as opposed to publicly managed connections.
Salesforce Lightning Connect
Just one example of this scenario is with Salesforce. As the volume of your customer and sales data continues its meteoric rise, so too do the sources and connection points where you find that data. Enterprises are now connecting more data into their CRM environment via the Salesforce Lightning Connect functionality. Salesforce Lightning Connect uses OData to integrate with external data in the same real-time way that it leverages native data. This becomes problematic, though, when data is not accessible in OData format. If you’re exposing internal data sources via an enterprise or private API, then the data will need to be translated into OData so that it can be picked up by the Lightning Connector.
About the Tutorial
Empowering you to access data for your application, cloud or platform is our passion at Progress DataDirect. Our products offer unique data connectivity solutions for enterprises needing to better integrate data across relational, big data and cloud databases. My colleague Saikrishna Bobba has published a step-by-step tutorial to walk you through the process of building JDBC & ODBC drivers to connect your APIs with Salesforce.
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James Goodfellow
James Goodfellow is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Progress and focuses his efforts on the DataDirect suite of solutions. Through his tenure at companies like Progress and SAS, he has spent the bulk of his career launching successful marketing campaigns for data and analytics products. James blogs here and around the web on topics such as data connectivity, analytics, IoT, visualization and machine learning. You can follow him on twitter at @jcgoodfellow.