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chuk2chuk2 

Import Custom Object - when trying to update using csv, all records are skipped as being new

Hello, I'm a bit new to sales force. I'm doing a one time update and insert to our custom object that tracks volunteers. There are about 550 records, of which about 100 are updates. I split the csv into two parts, one for updates and one for inserts. When I try update the records, it skipps all of them for being new. I assume the problem is that I am using the Volunteer ID which is the name field and is an autonumber.   

Currently the Volunteer ID's start at 000142 and go to 000305, there is no prefix or anything and I've tried making the column formatted to include the leading zeros or not to. I'm a bit stumped and any help would be good. 

Best Answer chosen by Admin (Salesforce Developers) 
champvimalchampvimal

Hi,

 

You need to use "Id" field of Volunteer object. Every object has "Id" attribute attached to each of its records when created. Since you want to update the 100 records, you need to extract Ids of all these records using Data Loader tool and then update these records using "Update" operation.

 

 

Thanks,

 

Vimal

All Answers

champvimalchampvimal

Hi,

 

You need to use "Id" field of Volunteer object. Every object has "Id" attribute attached to each of its records when created. Since you want to update the 100 records, you need to extract Ids of all these records using Data Loader tool and then update these records using "Update" operation.

 

 

Thanks,

 

Vimal

This was selected as the best answer
champvimalchampvimal

Just to add to the post I made, by "Id" I mean the 18 digit ID of the record.

 
chuk2chuk2

Thanks for your help! I came to a similar solution from looking elsewhere on the internet. I used excel connector to get a copy of the data from the cloud (the exporter was taking too long) and used access to merge it with my update csv. Then updated using Data Loader (after setting it to the test url for sandboxing and setting to batches of 10 to avoid apex errors). 

 

It appears you can update using external ID fields or using salesforce ID's (aka Record ID's), but not using the name fields. 
champvimalchampvimal

That is correct.

 

Alternately, you can also use "Upsert" operation to do both Insert and Update. Then External ID is a must in that case.

 

 

Thanks,

 

Vimal