Salesforce Output Tool: Null Values

Greetings! I am new to Alteryx. My first project is cleaning up some donor data in Salesforce. I am creating null values which seem to fail on output to Salesforce.

For example, a donor record shows [preferred_phone] as "Home" with no home phone number. In this case, because all of the other phone number fields are also blank, [preferred_phone] should be null. All is well on the Alteryx side in terms of creating the null values. The problem is the null values don't overwrite existing values in Salesforce upon output. I know overwriting with null values is a special setting in Data Loader, and my workaround for now is to output to CSV and use Data Loader to update records (blah!). Does anyone know if this is a limitation of Alteryx outputs to Salesforce or if there's something I should be doing differently?

Thanks for your help!

Output

Salesforce

Accepted answers

crpledger

When you want to push a null value use #N/A instead (simple formula replace). I just learned the trick to solve this exact issue. I am using it for a text field but hopefully it will work for other types as well.

All comments

unknown

A potential workaround is to change that phone number (assuming integer) to a string and then loading as a space ' '.

Kala_Weinacker

Thanks, Ryan. That would be a good idea for any of the phone fields. This issue is with the preferred phone field--home, mobile or work--rather than the actual phone number fields themselves. The preferred phone field is a dropdown in Salesforce, so the value has to be null or one of the three options mentioned. Grrrr!

crpledger

Kala_Weinacker

So helpful! Thank you!

cmcgaha

Thanks CP! Still helping me out 🙂

francois45p

"#N/A" has to be used for any field type but Date. Indeed the Salesforce Input tool is processing differently Date to format it as required by Salesforce.com (see Valid Date and DateTime Formats ). To set null dates, you will have to unfortunately customize your Salesforce Input tool (which did not cope with the null values for date). See DateTime formatting in Salesforce Output Tool . I customized my version of the Salesforce Output tool v1.3.1 and it worked :-)

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