Available in: Salesforce Classic |
Available in: Developer Edition Available for an extra cost in: Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions |
Traditionally, we’ve recommended importing or copying data into your Salesforce organization to let your users access that data. For example, extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools can integrate third-party systems with Salesforce. However, doing so copies data into your organization that you don’t need or that quickly becomes stale.
Even though the data is stored outside your organization, Lightning Connect provides seamless integration with the Force.com platform. External objects are available to Salesforce tools, such as global search, lookup relationships, record feeds, and the Salesforce1 app. External objects are also available to Apex, SOSL,SOQL queries, Salesforce APIs, and deployment via the Metadata API, change sets, and packages.
For example, suppose that you store product order information in a back-office ERP system. You want to view those orders as a related list on each customer record in your Salesforce organization. Lightning Connect enables you to set up a lookup relationship between the customer object (parent) and the external object (child) for orders. Then you can set up the page layouts for the parent object to include a related list that displays child records.
Going a step further, you can update the orders directly from the related list on the customer record. By default, records that are based on external objects are read-only. But you can make an external data source writable, which lets users create, modify, or delete records that are based on external objects from that data source.
For information about using Apex DML write operations on external object records, see the Force.com Apex Code Developer's Guide.