What is Salesforce Workbench?

What is Salesforce Workbench?

A workbench is a free API tool that was developed for making a connection between the Salesforce organization and developers & administrators. The purpose of this tool was for making interaction through Force APIs for deleting, updating, exporting and inserting data. This versatile toolkit was the development of the Salesforce Company which fully capable of providing robust support to Streaming, Rest, Bulk, Apex, and Metadata APIs.
This toolkit allows the user to perform operations such as query, manipulation, and migration of data. It also helps in transferring both metadata and data from the Salesforce server to directly to the browser of the user. This is done through the help of an intuitive and simple user interface.
There are many other advanced features for troubleshooting and testing Force APIs such as debug logs for API traffic, customizable SOAP headers, Backward Compatibility Testing and sign-in integration with the Salesforce application.

What is the purpose of Salesforce Workbench?

Similar to any real workbench, this toolkit is an application that would allow developers to view the data and metadata of the company’s core application. Other goals would include providing help with troubleshooting all bugs that are present in their applications.
It would also help to interact with various tools of Force.com APIs. Workbench would let the developer have performed and control the operation of the application which is not possible in other API clients.
As this toolkit is dependent on the web connection, workbench would suffer from connection or browser timeout. This feature could be fixed by adjusting the PHP setting of the toolkit.
It is also not advised to use large or heavy data loads while using the workbench. This toolkit is applicable for quick interaction with APIs.

Features of Salesforce Workbench

Salesforce Workbench is one of the basic instruments that help developers and administrators in controlling their application. This toolkit enables administrators and developers to perform SOSL Search, SOQL Query, test, Session settings, investigate applications and many other operations.
This toolkit has several functionalities that are very critical for the development and maintenance of web applications. Here are some of the features of the Salesforce Workbench that would help developers to work in a smarter way.

Allows you to edit records

This toolkit allows the developer or the administrator to observe any specific records of the organization just by entering its ID in the query items. The developer or the administrator could edit the record if he or she wants to change the record. If the data record is not from the workbench pre-existing database, then you would just have to enter the ID of the record in the single record field to retrieve the data file.

Allows you to purge and delete records

The purge option of the Salesforce Workbench is to erase any unwanted records permanently. This option is mainly applicable to those files present in the reuse container. The delete option is applicable when the developer wants to move any particular file into the reuse container. The developer would be able to undelete the record if the record has any undeletable quality.

Uses CSRF protection

Cross-Site Request Forgery or CSRF is the trap laid by programmers which allows them to use the information of the client for their benefits. Salesforce Workbench employs CSRF protection for ensuring that client record is kept secret. All clients would be able to change the security setting by going to the “CSRF SECURITY SETTINGS” option of the toolkit.
Enabling the CSRF security feature would provide another layer of protection to the instance of Salesforce Workbench of the developer. This feature is very effective in blocking any problematic logins from entering into your instance.

Allows you to retrieve and update any records

This is another powerful feature of the Salesforce Workbench. This toolkit allows the developer or the admin to either retrieve or update any data records. The retrieve feature doesn’t appear as an option on Salesforce Workbench. The user would have to enter a URL to view this page. This internal page allows the developers to observe all details related to the record.
On the top of the “Retrieve” page, there would be the option of “Update”.  Through this function, you would be able to manually change or reset those “under the hood” values data fields of the record.
From the above the article about the Salesforce Workbench, you would be able to create a basic idea about this toolkit. Through this toolkit, you would be able to perform various operations that would not be possible through other APIs. This toolkit is very easy to use; the developer would just have to follow a guide that flashes through the toolkit itself.