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Workday Education
Last Updated: 2026-07-10
Overview of Workday Extend

Overview of Workday Extend

Overview

In this chapter, we will share our vision for creating Workday Extend. You will learn about the high-level architecture of the system, and we will discuss use cases to demonstrate what types of applications you can build. Lastly, we will explore resources that can help guide your app design.

Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
  • List key components provided by Workday Extend.
  • Describe the types of apps that developers can build.
  • Navigate the developer site.
  • Locate additional resources.

Overview of Workday Extend

With Workday Extend, your company will have more control over experiences within Workday, allowing developers to build personalized applications. Workday Extend provides many REST (Representational State Transfer) APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, which enable two applications to exchange information with one another. This exchange allows you to use your resources and technology in innovative ways, while bringing the Workday experience into your applications.

Vision and Key Benefits of Workday Extend

Workday Extend Vision
Workday Extend enables you to build extensions and custom applications for our core Workday products.
Key Benefits of Workday Extend
Workday Extend allows you to build apps that:
  • Run inside of and interact with Workday.
  • Look and feel like Workday.
  • Read and write Workday data.
  • Use the Workday organizational and security models.
  • Are update safe.

Use Cases

Many organizations want to simplify their IT landscape. Workday Extend gives customers a way to consolidate platforms and reduce maintenance costs for their custom apps. With custom extensions and apps, you can augment the Workday functionality and:
  • Streamline and automate new workflows within Workday by bringing apps running on external platforms into Workday.
  • Create new experiences in Workday that replicate the Workday experience.
  • Bring Workday into natural workspaces with Slack, Outlook, or Amazon Alexa integrations.
  • Tailor Workday to meet your specific business or industry needs with, for example, an app that deals with healthcare-specific global compliance issues.
With Workday Extend applications, you can streamline and automate new workflows within Workday; create new experiences within Workday; bring Workday into natural workspaces; and create industry-specific extensions and applications.
Workday Extend Use Cases
Note
: Though you can integrate Workday into natural workspaces, you may need a separate SKU outside of Extend. Keep in mind that using additional capability outside of your paid subscription would require you to purchase that capability.
Below are use cases from existing Workday Extend customers:
  • Register vehicles that will be onsite.
  • Buy and sell paid time off.
  • Tuition reimbursement requests.
  • Headcount requests for contingent workers.
  • Sales opportunity tracking.

Introduction to App Components

App Components as Building Blocks
App components are the building blocks that your developer will use when developing Workday Extend apps.
These blocks fall into the following categories:
  • UI/UX
  • Data
  • Logic
  • Security
  • Reporting
There are five app-component types: UI and UX components, data components, logic components, security components, and reporting components. UI and UX components include presentation components, pages, and tasks. Data components include business objects and attachment objects. Logic components include business processes and orchestrations. Security components include domains. Reporting components include reports.
App Components
This course will cover how to incorporate each component into the app design phase.

Additional Resources

App Catalog:
  • Contains sample app code that demonstrates Extend functionality and that you can also install
  • From the Workday Extend Developer site, select the menu at the top left of the page. Then, under the Reference section, select App Catalog.
Workday Marketplace:
  • Contains partner-created apps that you can browse and even establish a contractual implementation with a partner to implement that app for your company
  • From the Workday Extend Developer site, select the menu at the top left of the page. Then, under the Inspiration section, select Workday Marketplace.
App Discovery Doc
In this couse, you will use the App Discovery doc. You can access and download the doc in the Workday Learning Center.
You can also access additional information that can help as you complete this document by navigating to the developer site. Then, search for and select the Approaching an Extend App for Non-Developers and Developers page.

Chapter Summary

In this chapter, you learned:
  • Workday Extend allows developers to build personalized, custom applications that have that appear similarly to Workday.
  • UI/UX, data, logic, and security components are the Workday Extend building blocks.
  • The developer site contains helpful Workday Extend resources.