I'm a software architect and work with web applications for a several time. If WF worked with external API calls it could be the preferred way to make Web Applications, not just CMS. Maybe facing giants frameworks! And it could be used for making web applications for any kind of business you can imagine. How could you ask about use cases? Think of all kind of business it's around you! All of them has opportunities that could be solved by web applications. Not mentioning a centralized API for both, web and smartphone apps!!! And you could have the "separation of concerns", a principle of solution's architecture.

Just chipping in to this wishlist request with an example where I would need this feature now. I have a client who have developed their own API endpoints to access compensation amounts by career specialty and region. Their site is hosted in Webflow and I need to ideally create a secure connection to their external API in order to power a series of widgets that provide interactive interrogation of this data.

I get that this is a really specific scenario — but we are finding clients and startups are now increasingly coming to us with their own services in place and an expectation to be able to utilise them in their site.

Most articles I found online point to using Identity and JWT. But this would only be used by other systems and authenticating before every request, or forcing developers to store a JWT for a given period of time sound like too much work.

What comes to mind is using Basic Auth (we already have Identity and it doesn't support it) or generating an API token of some sort and validate that for every request.

Hi Sachin,

there are many cases where you should be able to call external APIs. For example, customers often have their own servers that can be accessed via a REST API. If you could now simply load this data with Webflow via the external REST API and display it in a similar way to the Webflow CMS (Collection list or Collection pages), you would be able to use Webflow for many more projects than just static websites or only limited dynamic websites. I think to achieve that with Webflow at the moment, you have to work with embedded elements.

The fact that the dynamic display of data only works via the Webflow CMS limits the scope of use of Webflow very much, as you often have your own server where you can do a lot more with the data and often you don't just need this data for a website.

A very great feature would also be if you could connect your own database (e.g. MongoDB) to Webflow so that customers could easily enter the data via the Webflow CMS Editor.

Hi Tobias,

Can you please throw light on a couple of uses cases that you would have solved by calling external APIs?

Thanks