Final Warning For Legacy Salesforce API Retirement In Summer ’22

Matt/ April 11, 2022/ Integration, Salesforce, Technology

There has been a lot of infatuation for Flow in the Salesforce ecosystem recently, especially since the announcement of the phased depreciation of Workflow and Process Builder. But there is a much more urgent deprecation on the horizon that can cause breaking changes overnight to your Salesforce production org integrations. Yes, you read that right. Your Salesforce org is a ticking time-bomb, and you only have two months to prevent catastrophe.

If this statement concerns you – it should!

Stick around; I’m going to explain the situation and give you a tool you can use to assess your risk level in minutes, leaving you plenty of time to deal with the issue and avoid disaster. Most importantly, I’ll introduce you to the talented man responsible for bringing us this tool.

The Dirty Details

When Summer ’21 was released a year ago, a number of legacy Salesforce Platform API versions were marked for deprecation. The API versions remained functional but were no longer supported, and were earmarked for cessation with the Summer ’22 release. This released is scheduled in two months, on June 11th, 2022.

After that date, any integrations using the following legacy API versions will break:

• SOAP: 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0, 11.0,11.1, 12.0, 13.0, 14.0, 15.0, 16.0, 17.0, 18.0, 19.0, 20.0
• REST: v20.0
• Bulk: 16.0, 17.0, 18.0, 19.0, 20.0

Here is what this could mean for your business:

Yikes. The salesforce docs page linked above provides some helpful hints you can use to retrieve event logs that report on SOAP and REST API activity. But I’m a fan of working smarter, not harder.

Thankfully, Nicolas Vuillamy has published a tool called sfdx-hardis that you can use to identify the risk to your business in a matter of minutes. He worked harder and gave the rest of us a plugin to help us save time. Nicolas is the real hero of this story.

sfdx-hardis is a plugin for Salesforce DX by Hardis Group, where Nicolas is CTO. This plugin has a command you can use to retrieve an immediate report on your legacy API uses.

Assuming you have sfdx installed, you an install sfdx-hardis with this command:

sfdx plugins:install sfdx-hardis

Once you have the plugin installed, you can run identify Legacy API risks with the following command:

sfdx hardis:org:diagnose:legacyapi

This will create three files on your drive. For me, those are

1. legacy-api-for-matt.mcguire@login.com.csv
2. legacy-api-for-matt.mcguire@login.com.api-clients-WARNING.csv
3. legacy-api-for-matt.mcguire@login.com.api-clients-INFO.csv

The first file is a list of all entries in the EventLogFile object in your org over the last 24 hours where the EventType is either API, RestApi, or ApiTotalUsage.

The next two are summary reports. The report suffixed with -WARNING summarizes the client integrations that will break when Summer ’22 rolls out. sfdx-hardis gives you a count of the number of entries for each client IP, and even attempts to identify the client hostname for you. The report suffixed with -INFO summarizes the client integrations that will break when Summer ’23 rolls out.

Yes, you read that right. A year from now, we have another set of Legacy API versions that will suddenly stop working. Those include:

• SOAP: 21.0, 22.0, 23.0, 24.0, 25.0, 26.0, 27.0, 28.0, 29.0, 30.0
• REST: v21.0, v22.0, v23.0, v24.0, v25.0, v26.0, v27.0, v28.0, v29.0, v30.0
• Bulk: 21.0, 22.0, 23.0, 24.0, 25.0, 26.0, 27.0, 28.0, 29.0, 30.0

You might be wondering why these API versions are being deprecated and why this announcement has received so little publicity. I think there are very good reasons for this.

First, there are concerns with performance and security, both of which are addressed by upgrading to the latest API versions.

Second, the no-code automation darling of the platform, Flow, has been given incredible new features over the last two years. The addition of before & after contexts and the newly-added Outbound Message capability have excited many people in the ecosystem, and helped to overshadow the Legacy API retirement.

Chances are your in-house architect or development team is on top of this issue already, but if not, it would be wise to inform your COE (Center of Excellence) so they can help to prepare for this important change.

Further reading: Salesforce Developer Blog