New Named Credentials and Basic Auth

“Legacy” Named Credentials support a whole host of authentication methods. “New” Named Credentials - not so much. One of the basic things missing is Basic Auth. Sure Basic Auth is pretty outdated and really not as secure as we’d like. But there are still plenty of end points out there that offer Basic Auth and it can be useful. So how can we use the new Named Credentials and still use Basic Auth?

Oh no! No Basic Auth!

Fortunately we can actually have basic auth without writing any code (although a little formula will be required).

Before we get into the configuration details what is Basic Auth? Basic Auth is a header passed on the HTTP request. It’ll look something like this

Authorization: Basic dXNlcm5hbWU6cGFzc3dvcmQ=

This is the basic auth header for a username of username and a password word of password. It is generated base64 encoding the string <username>:<password> where <username> is the username and <password> is the password. Then prefix with Basic and that’s your header value. Pretty simple right?

So let’s start by creating an External Credential and adding a Principal with a couple of parameters: one for the Username, one for the Password. Salesforce will protect these for us so we don’t have to worry about the encryption at rest etc - it’s handled for us

Now we can create a Custom Header that uses the parameters from the principal. This will use a formula to calculate the Base 64 encoded value discussed above. The formula is

{!'Basic ' & BASE64ENCODE(BLOB($Credential.BasicAuth.Username & ':' & $Credential.BasicAuth.Password))}

• Note that in this formula BasicAuth is the name of the External Credential, Username and Password are the parameter names. This is a bit fiddly! Maybe use the nice new methods discussed in the previous entry to automate the creation of this.

Save the custom header and then Create a Named Credential and add the External Credential to a Permission Set as normal