Create new connector to pull Salesforce Reports

[Vincent]

Create new connector to pull Salesforce Reports

We are a large company with tens of thousands employees using Salesforce on a daily basis. Over the years, we have worked with Salesforce to make many customizations and create many reports to provide data for various reporting needs. However, we have increasingly found it inefficient and prone to error to download the reports manually. We have many teams using the Salesforce reports as a base to create additional business insights.

Alteryx is a great tool to manage data ETL and workflows, but it does not support pulling data from Salesforce reports directly. Instead, it only offers connectors to pull data from base Salesforce objects. The data from Salesforce objects such as tables can be useful, but do not necessarily offer the logical view of Salesforce reports, and may require a lot of efforts to reconcile the data consistency against the reports our users are used to. Sometimes, it may be impossible to repeat producing the same data from Salesforce tables as those from Salesforce reports. That in turn would cause a lot of efforts spent by the reporting teams, their audience, and users of the Salesforce reports to match things up.

Salesforce does not have any out-of-box solution to schedule downloading the reports. At our request, their support team did some research and have not found a good 3rd-party solution in the Salesforce App Exchange ecosystem that supports this need.

I strongly believe this is a great opportunity for Alteryx. Salesforce already has an API that allows for building custom applications to pull Salesforce reports. However, most Salesforce users are more business oriented and do not necessarily have the appetite to engage with their IT staff or external resources provide to develop such apps and bear the burden to main them.

I have attached the Salesforce Reports and Dashboards API Developer Guide for your reference.

Sincerely,

Vincent Wang

[wale_ilori]

We still need this!!!

[ARich]

We're hoping to have this implemented by Q3.

[Ufuk]

This is a must ! We can save so much time ... !!! I need to extract a flat file from salesforce report and then combine in altreyx workflow. 

[Sgabello]

This is an excellent idea! What I use now is the Salesforce.com Report connector in excel. In Power Query: "New Query"  --> "From Other Sources" , you will find "From Salesforce Reports". Then I input this excel file in via input data. What I miss is a macro that can kick of the data retrieval in excel, any ideas until this is live Alteryx?

[ClementineH]

Hi, has there been any progress on this? I have hours of extra processing each week, to extract custom reports from Salesforce, so I can use them in my workflows.

[JimPer]

Hi, I would also be really interested to know the progress on this new connector as it will save me a lot of time ! 

Thanks in advance

[calebdugger]

Hey everyone! This was something I have been really looking forward to so I have been paying attention as well. It hasn't been talked about on here from what I've seen, but this is already completed! Make sure you are running the most recent version (I am running 2018.3). The Salesforce connector created by Alteryx has to be downloaded from the Gallery (this part is a little confusing/frustrating to me because the output and the older input is not on my Connectors tab any longer since updating to Windows 10). You will be able to tell it is a new connector because the field name, Size, and Type are no longer in pretty columns and are all pushed together making it more difficult to read.

I have included what the Input looks like that lets you pull in the first 2,000 rows of your report - I believe this is a limitation by Salesforce?

The link for the Salesforce input download on the gallery is: https://gallery.alteryx.com/#!app/Salesforce-Input-Tool/59b84ccbeffc2a09d4057c43

I hope this helps!

 New Salesforce Input Connector

[zhuyyu]

Thanks Caleb

It's great, but only pull first 2000 rows, is a big issue for me. Half of my reports have more than 2000 rows. Anyone knows how to work around this ? Thanks.

[Rob_van_Waveren]

Technically I would not know, but it is definitely not a Salesforce limitation since both XL Connector AND Cloud4J Report Builder are capable of retrieving much more rows (at least up to the Excel limit of around 1 million, I personally never needed more)

[ARich]

This has been implemented in the latest Salesforce connector, which can be found on the Gallery: https://gallery.alteryx.com/#!districts/57278188aa690a0f90abb918