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The_PhoenixThe_Phoenix 

Weekly Data Export and Attachments & Documents

I've requested a Data Export, but the attachments and documents in the zip file are useless...  My guess is that they are probably encoded, but there's no file type attached to it (such as .uue).  How can we extract these files directly on Windows?

 

Thanks

ScotScot

Good catch. This is another breakage of the weekly backup which dates all the way back to the Winter04 release (last november).

While it doesn't help us much, the problem isn't that the attachments are encoded, but that the names have lost the extension that allows Windows to open them.

Prior to the Winter04 release (last november) the attachments had names like:
    00P00000003qpxw_eBIS Customers by Industry and Country.xls

Since that time ... as you have noted ... they have become useless. That same attachment is now named:
    00P00000003qpxwEEA

You can no longer select a file based on it's real name, nor can you determine what type of file it is, or open it.

Theoretically, you could use one of these files by
   1) Finding the file in the attachments.csv file
   2) Determining the file name and the id
   3) Finding the file whose name is equal to the id
   4) Renaming the file to the filename
   5) Opening it

In my opinion, this is awful. I am embarassed not to have noticed the change (since I now have more than six months of backups that are less useful), but I'm also disturbed that we had no notice of this major change.

 

   

The_PhoenixThe_Phoenix

Good catch. This is another breakage of the weekly backup which dates all the way back to the Winter04 release (last november).

While it doesn't help us much, the problem isn't that the attachments are encoded, but that the names have lost the extension that allows Windows to open them.

Prior to the Winter04 release (last november) the attachments had names like:
    00P00000003qpxw_eBIS Customers by Industry and Country.xls

Since that time ... as you have noted ... they have become useless. That same attachment is now named:
    00P00000003qpxwEEA

You can no longer select a file based on it's real name, nor can you determine what type of file it is, or open it.

Theoretically, you could use one of these files by
   1) Finding the file in the attachments.csv file
   2) Determining the file name and the id
   3) Finding the file whose name is equal to the id
   4) Renaming the file to the filename
   5) Opening it

In my opinion, this is awful. I am embarassed not to have noticed the change (since I now have more than six months of backups that are less useful), but I'm also disturbed that we had no notice of this major change.

-----

Scot, thanks for the quick reply, but that's quite ridiculous... I had already figured the work-around, but I didn't thought that there wasn't anything smarter than this.  I guess I should log a case if I want decend backup?

Thanks again!
ScotScot

Agreed ... it is pretty appalling.

I just logged a case myself.
benjasikbenjasik
we'll dig into it
The_PhoenixThe_Phoenix
I also submitted a case...  For the time being, support suggested that we use vlookup to find the attachment name... :-)
benjasikbenjasik
This was a design change - not a casual breakage. This change (along with the more major structural changes in columns/column order (repleat with an autogenerated report of before and afters) was covered in the admin preview for 138). The idea here is that Attachments.csv is an index into the /Attachments folder in the zip. There is no data loss in any way.

See the admin preview for the Winter release. http://www.salesforce.com/newsevents/winter05/index.jsp
ScotScot

Benji,

Thank you for the research and answers.

I can't help but note that
   >  the changed naming of the attachments was not described in either the admin preview nor the final release documents.
   >  while the information is available in the csv file to alter the attachments, the change does make it much more difficult to access them
   >  the attachments.csv file as an index to the attachments is useful, but is not new.  It existed before in the same form as today

Anyway, I'll pursue it further outside the forum ...

Scot
ScotScot

Response from support:

Thank you for your feedback. This is a known issue that is currently being prioritized on our product roadmap. I have logged your case against this known issue.

We value each and every request submitted by our customers and make all efforts to include your request in future releases.

At the present time, you have to use the documents.csv and the attachments.csv files to get the file type extensions.  Using the IDs to match the proper file to the proper file type extension, you can rename the links with the proper extensions.

Thank you,