The API provides two WSDLs to choose from:
- Enterprise Web Services WSDL—Used by enterprise developers
to build client applications for a single Salesforce organization. The enterprise WSDL is strongly
typed, which means that it contains objects and fields with specific
data types, such as int and string.Customers who use the enterprise WSDL document must download and
re-consume it whenever their organization makes a change to its custom
objects or fields or whenever they want to use a different version
of the API. To access the current WSDL for your organization, log in to
your Salesforce organization and click .
- Partner Web Services WSDL—Used for client applications that are metadata-driven and dynamic in nature. It is particularly—but not exclusively—useful
to salesforce.com partners who are building client applications for multiple
organizations. As a loosely typed representation of the Salesforce data
model that works with name-value pairs of field names and values instead
of specific data types, it can be used to access data within any organization. This WSDL is most appropriate for developers of clients that can
issue a query call to get information about an object before the client
acts on the object. The partner WSDL document only needs to be downloaded and consumed
once per version of the API. To access the current WSDL for your organization, log
in to your Salesforce organization
and click .
In general, the enterprise WSDL is more straightforward to use,
while the partner WSDL is more flexible and dynamically adaptable
to different organizations, allowing you to write a single application
that can be used for multiple users and multiple organizations.