Unboxing Salesforce Knowledge Rest APIs

Question:

You might wonder why we are talking about the composite resources here, Yes — I didn’t share the context earlier.

What happens normally in an enterprise business model is you don’t have just one system responsible for knowledge articles creation and at times there comes the need to integrate various types of content (FAQ, Manuals, instructions etc.) from multiple sources and bring them to Salesforce as a single repository for operational usage (e.g for your Sales/support agents or customers etc.)

And this is where using a composite resource at your integration layer (dell Boomi/Mulesoft) who are orchestrating the data/ integration flow is helpful to reduce many API calls, hence the need for the composite resource so that they don’t have to repeat the process again and again.

Approach 1:

Here we will use the combination of Composite 1) (sobject Tree) resource in combination with 2) Knowledge Invokable action from above, thereby creating multiple records with 1 or fewer API call(s) to process all records together (given: maximum limit 200 total records across all trees / per callout)

The idea here is to bulkify and process multiple records together in just one or few API calls rather than serially processing per record with ↔ 1 API call, what it means is we map all the records from an external system into the request payload and pass it over as part of the same API call avoiding the need to make as many API calls as the number of records

You can even create a structure for processing the parent-child relationship (as we need in our case with knowledge article version and data categories) in the sample payload and send multiple records keeping in mind we don’t go over the maximum 200 total records limit per call.

Check out an amazing Salesforce video tutorial here: Salesforce To Salesforce Integration Using REST API

Concluding again, here is the benefit:

1. As said already, we can create multiple records of the same type of knowledge articles (knowledge__kav) k1, k2, and k3 together in 1 API calls which avoids jumping back and forth and avoiding multiple resource calls.

• + You can create child records (nested parent-child) for knowledge__kav with data categories as well k1+ dc1, k2 +dc2, k3+dc3 (where dc means data category and k1: Knowledge article) combining 2 operations in 1 plus offering the ability to do it for multiple records.

For all records from the external system, create a single big payload (remember max: 200 records) containing few too many records and do both operations,

1. Create articles and assign them data categories using 1 single api call

2. Mass publish them with 1 API call

Method : POST
/services/data/v54.0/composite/tree/Knowledge__kav

{
"records" :[{
    "attributes" : {"type" : "Knowledge__kav", "referenceId" : "ref1"},
     "summary":"Summary for the Article",
     "title":"hello world 13",
     "urlName":"hello-world13",   
     "DataCategorySelections" : {
      "records" : [{
         "attributes" : {"type" : "Knowledge__DataCategorySelection", "referenceId" : "ref2"},
          "DataCategoryGroupName":"Product",
           "DataCategoryName":"XP80"
         },{
         "attributes" : {"type" : "Knowledge__DataCategorySelection", "referenceId" : "ref3"},
           "DataCategoryGroupName":"Product",
           "DataCategoryName":"X21"
         }]
      }
    },{
    "attributes" : {"type" : "Knowledge__kav", "referenceId" : "ref4"},
     "summary":"Summary for the Article ",
     "title":"hello world 14",
     "urlName":"hello-world14",
     "DataCategorySelections" : {
      "records" : [{
        "attributes" : {"type" : "Knowledge__DataCategorySelection", "referenceId" : "ref5"},
          "DataCategoryGroupName":"Product",
          "DataCategoryName":"XP80"
        }]
      }   
  }]
}
Raw Response

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2022 19:36:36 GMT
Content-Encoding: gzip
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
{
    "hasErrors" : false,
    "results" : [ {
        "referenceId" : "ref1",
        "id" : "ka15e0000011oCbAAI"
  }, {
        "referenceId" : "ref4",
        "id" : "ka15e0000011oCcAAI"
  }, {
        "referenceId" : "ref2",
        "id" : "02o5e00000224utAAA"
  }, {
        "referenceId" : "ref3",
        "id" : "02o5e00000224uuAAA"
  }, {
        "referenceId" : "ref5",
        "id" : "02o5e00000224uxAAA"
  } ]
}

After this they need to collect the knowledge articles versions id from the response above and pass it into the method we already talked about for mass publishing. (vXX.x/actions/standard/publishKnowledgeArticles/”) to publish them all together

Last Point, in order to use the composite resource, prior check the sobject and operations it supports as there are some minor limitations to it but not blockers:). An example “invocable Action API” to mass publish articles is NOT supported in the composite resources but only in batch composite type resource, here are the details - https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_rest.meta/api_rest/resources_composite_batch.htm