Community Spring Cleaning week is here! Join your fellow Maveryx in digging through your old posts and marking comments on them as solved. Learn more here!

Alteryx Designer Desktop Discussions

Find answers, ask questions, and share expertise about Alteryx Designer Desktop and Intelligence Suite.
SOLVED

Alteryx connection with Salesforce - limitations

TGNAlteryx
6 - Meteoroid

Hi data gurus!

 

I am trying to resolve the limitations that Salesforce has when exporting data with Alteryx. 

 

1. I manage to connect Alteryx to pull Salesforce data.

 

2. However, instead of object  names I get their object codes (so called Field Record ID) so the information becomes unreadable.

 

I googled it and seems a limitation of Salesforce but want to ask for your valuable experience if you can share it please. 

 

Kind regards,

Tatyana

4 REPLIES 4
Kanderson
10 - Fireball

Tatyana, I also use Alteryx to connect to Salesforce.com but do not experience this issue. Salesforce fields have a display name and an API name. As with most third party tools that connect to Salesforce Alteryx uses the API name. When creating custom fields on a Salesforce object you are able to choose your API name, but by default Salesforce will replace spaces with underscores and append the __c value indicating a custom field.

 

You should see your API names of the Alteryx input tool. Does this help?

 

Capture.PNG      Capture2.PNG

 

 

Kevin

 

TGNAlteryx
6 - Meteoroid

Hi,

 

Thank you for your reply. Excuse me but I don't quite get it. 

 

 

I attached an image of what my options are when configure the connection.

 

As you can see, yes Salesforce replaces spaces with underscores and append the __c value indicating a custom field.

 

What am I missing?

 

snap.PNG

Kanderson
10 - Fireball

This all looks perfect. Alteryx uses the API names for objects and fields because they are unique, and are required by the salesforce REST API. Display names can be duplicated accross object. The API name is chosen at the time the object is created; however, I would not go back and change the names... too much work and would have far reaching impacts on the system.

 

One possible solution would be go pull your meta data out of Salesforce. This can be done with a variety of applications. A popular free application is called easy describe:

 

DESCRIPTION
EasyDescribe is a free Force.com developer tool to view and extract object metadata details. Don't waste time clicking through multiple screens to lookup recordtypes, field types, picklists, and other metadata. EasyDescribe it and get everything at once!
 
You can pull this meta data into Alteryx and use the dynamic rename tool to replace the API names with display names. This application would require a Salesforce administrator to install. Depending on the number of fields you are pulling down, it may be easier to go into your Salesforce object settings and gather the API names you need.
 
Sorry I couldnt be more help. If you are able to share more about what you are trying to do I'd be happy to dig a bit deeper. Also there are some good Alteryx tools on the Gallery that are Salesforce related. You maybe want to give them a look.
 
Kevin

 

charlie_archer
7 - Meteor

Hi Tatyana,

 

The Alteryx Salesforce connector is currently limited to exporting a single table of data. 

 

To receive information into other objects you will need to connect to another table, pull through the relevant fields and 'Join' these onto the main extract using the unique ID's you mentioned as your lookup.

 

Many thanks,

Charlie

Labels