In accordance with an embodiment, described herein is a system and method for graphically displaying recommended mappings between a source data object and a target data object in a design time of a cloud-based integration service. The system can include a recommendation engine that provides recommended mappings between the source and target data objects, so that the recommended mappings can be graphically displayed in a mapping interface. The recommended mappings can be filtered based one or more filtering criteria. Each recommended mapping can be displayed differently from an actual mapping, and can be associated with a reliability/quality indicator. A particular recommended mapping can be accepted to become an actual mapping, or to be rejected. The system allows a user to toggle between actual mappings and recommended mappings between the source and target data objects.