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svincent
SForce Data Loader + Joined Tables
Forgive me if this has been asked before -- I searched, but failed to find answers in the archives.
I am evaluating salesforce.com for my employer, and am trying to do a test upload of my company's data, using the SForce Dataloader.
Creating the CSV files that conform to the salesforce.com data model is straightforward: we have tables corresponding to Accounts, Contacts, etc in our legacy system.
The problem I have is foreign key joins.
For example, I would like to create and import two CSV files, one containing Accounts and one containing Contacts. The Contact record requires a reference to the salesforce ID of the corresponding Account, but I don't have that: I haven't created the Account yet.
I can do a multi-pass import (import Accounts first, and then use the IDs created to create the Contact CSV), but I'd rather not -- how is this intended to work? I think I must be missing something.
Any help would be deeply appreciated!
Thanks,
-Shawn Vincent.
svincent@exalt.com
I am evaluating salesforce.com for my employer, and am trying to do a test upload of my company's data, using the SForce Dataloader.
Creating the CSV files that conform to the salesforce.com data model is straightforward: we have tables corresponding to Accounts, Contacts, etc in our legacy system.
The problem I have is foreign key joins.
For example, I would like to create and import two CSV files, one containing Accounts and one containing Contacts. The Contact record requires a reference to the salesforce ID of the corresponding Account, but I don't have that: I haven't created the Account yet.
I can do a multi-pass import (import Accounts first, and then use the IDs created to create the Contact CSV), but I'd rather not -- how is this intended to work? I think I must be missing something.
Any help would be deeply appreciated!
Thanks,
-Shawn Vincent.
svincent@exalt.com
I've also run into the problem that Account is self-joined (parent Account, for example).
Is there any way of causing some Salesforce import pipeline to join tables based on my external id? Or must I just do multi-pass imports?
Thanks!
-Shawn.
check it out, it may have the feature you are looking for
under Setup-> Data Management -> Import Custom Objects
https://na1.salesforce.com/ui/setup/imp/ImportWizardWelcomePage
don't know about events and activities, never tried that ( outside of a few times i used excel connector for that)
I don't think you're going to be able to avoid doing a multi-pass import. When I converted our org's data, we had a data structure very similar to salesforce's, but it was all in SQL server, with it's own primary keys. I basically had to upload the account records, and then download the accountids + old primary key down into my database so I could build a cross-reference table that would let me link the new salesforce account records with my old contact records. I then had to do the same thing with contact records, so I could link them to the task/event records.
It was a very complex process, but it really paid off for us when we deployed salesforce at our company: the users had a pretty good idea of where the data was, because it was in a structure they were used to.
Good luck!
Jeff