Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Import Data into Salesforce

It's such a common topic. It's covered by numerous posts, SF documents, tutorials and even on youtube. However, as I embark on the journey, with the help of all the online resource, I still need to feel my own way through. Here is my lesson while uploading the initial Accounts and Contacts data.

1. Data Loader (locally installed exe) is generally considered more powerful and can load larger amount of data than the Wizard. However, Data Loader can only load one type of records in a data file! Furthermore, it uses SF internal ID (one of those funky long 15 or 18 characters ID's).

The implication is not very pleasant. If you need to import Accounts and Contacts, then you need to import Account first, then retrieve the ID's, then update your Contact data file to correlate the SF internal ID's for Accounts. I think that's too much for my case.

2. Luckily for me, I only need a single piece of data for Account, when I generated the Contacts CSV file, I placed the account name into the "Account" column. Import wizard auto generates the Accounts using that column.

3. Rest of the CSV field names should use "Field Label", not the actual "Field Name", definitely not the xxx__c name, otherwise. You have to manually map any fields if Wizard cannot auto map them.

4. date format uses mm/dd/yyyy (i suppose it's defined by the object field in SF?)

5. boolean takes "true/false" (maybe configurable in SF?)


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