Salesforce Output Tool: Null Values

[Kala_Weinacker]

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!

[Inactive User]

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!

[Inactive User]

Logically though - if you have at least one phone number, than that phone number would be the preferred. If you have two or more good phone numbers, you can then select a rule that defaults to each one (if a preferred was not selected). If you are in the situation where you have no phone numbers, you can load ' ' to the other phone numbers (mobile, home, work, etc.) and thus now have that option to place ' ' within preferred. As you mentioned, your limitation is either null or the other numbers; if the other numbers are ' ' then problem solved.

[Kala_Weinacker]

You are absolutely correct. If there is at least one phone number, that phone number is preferred. Hence, selecting either work, home or mobile from the drop-down.

However, when there isn't a phone number in any of the fields, the drop-down should be left blank. I wrote a workflow to identify records where work, mobile or home was selected from the drop-down, when the drop-down should have remained blank. Put very simply, this has nothing to do with manipulating the phone number fields. I have tried replacing the preferred drop-down field with Null() and with ''. At it's base, this is an issue of null or empty Alteryx outputs failing to overwrite existing values in Salesforce.

If you work with Salesforce, you might recognize this as a symptom similar to importing null or empty values using the Salesforce Data Loader. When using the Data Loader, if you don't adjust a special setting to overwrite existing values with null or empty values, your update won't return any errors but the values won't be overwritten as desired. The Salesforce output in Alteryx may not account for this special setting, which is the most logical explanation for why my null or empty Alteryx values aren't overwriting the incorrect drop-down values in Salesforce.

When I output Alteryx results to CSV and perform the update in Salesforce via Data Loader with the aforementioned special setting, the null or empty values successfully overwrite the existing ones. For example, where the drop-down once said work, home, or mobile, it is now empty as it should be.

So, my question is whether there is a Salesforce-specific output limitation in Alteryx that prevents null or empty values from overwriting existing ones.

[Inactive User]

The Salesforce tool is using an API to populate the datasets. If there is not a special setting in the API (look at the API documentation) then this may not work. You can create a custom Alteryx API output macro to Salesforce if there is and that should take care of the problem. Or do what you have done and just do periodic corrections on the nulls manually using CSV files from Alteryx. I would think as well that having no number listed in the CRM sounds like a higher-level issue that should not be happening in the first place?

[crpledger · Accepted solution]

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.  

[Kala_Weinacker]

So helpful! Thank you!

[cmcgaha]

Thanks CP! Still helping me out 🙂