Tag: CLI

Most Frequently used SFDX Commands

Salesforce Developer Experience - SFDX

Table of Content

If we already have Salesforce Metadata API, Force.com IDE and other tools then why do we need one more tool like Salesforce DX ?

In tools like Changeset, Metadata API or Force.com IDE, source of truth is Sandbox. Although we can setup process and continuous integration (CI) to use some source code management (SCM) like Git or SVN. However these kind of setup takes time, expertise and lot of effort.

Salesforce DX not only solves above problem but

  • Ability to consider SCM as source of truth
  • Use any favorite IDE or any SCM
  • Powerful CLI to help minimizing complexity of setting up CI
  • Updated Force.com IDE to support Salesforce DX if you are not comfortable with CLI
  • and most important, spin off Scratch Orgs within minutes through script to quickly work on POC or package based development

What are scratch Orgs ?

Salesforce DX can be enabled for any Salesforce instance and they are known as Developer Hub. One Developer Hub can have multiple Scratch Orgs. Scratch Orgs are temporary Salesforce org which can be created quickly and metadata can be deployed from SCM. These kind of Orgs can be used by developers to perform quick proof of concept or build and test packages. Once package is build and saved back on SCM, scratch org can be destroyed easily.

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All about Upsert and External ID in Dataloader and Apex – Videos

You may be wondering that there are tons of articles available for upsert operation and what is need of one more blog post. I wanted to note everything important about upsert operations using datalaoder and Apex with identified gotchas at single place, and that’s why its here 🙂 .

External ID is field in Salesforce to say that this field is primary key in external Database which can be used to identify that external record exists in Salesforce or not ? There are many benefits of external key like :

  • It can be used to identify if record exists or not and record automatically inserted or updated using upsert operation
  • Upsert operation is supported by Dataloader, Apex and API
  • Any field marked as external id is indexed and can be used in SOQL or report filter
  • You can create Parent child record in single statement in Apex

Using Upsert operation to create/update child record and relate to existing parent record with help of External Id

Lets assume that you have list of contacts and Account in external SQL Server database and you want to import those Account and contact weekly. It is possible that you have already imported contacts previously so don’t want to duplicate records if already created in Salesforce. To solve this problem we can use external Id on Contact and use upsert operation on dataloader. Let’s assume external Id field on Contact is “SQL_Server__Id__c” (I am assuming that Account records in Salesforce also have external Id and records are already imported. Same below steps can be used to import Account record as well).

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Using Dataloader and ANT to backup Salesforce data on FTP or SFTP server – Video

We will be using command line dataloader from Salesforce and ANT script to extract data from Salesforce and backup on FTP server. I would recommend to go through this article first to get familiar with basics of commandline dataloader and followed by this article to get some insight that how we can use ANT with dataloader.

There can be hundreds of use cases where we need to backup data from salesforce and we have thousands of options. We can use Jitterbit, Mulesoft, Dataloader.io or some big ETL tools like BOOMI or informatica. However sometimes clients are not willing to pay hefty  amount on licensing cost of ETL tools and I love open source. In this article, we will be using open source solution to very common problem of backing up data on FTP server.

Complete code is available on my github account as well in case you need it.

Use Dataloader and ANT to back CSV file on FTP Server
Use Dataloader and ANT to back CSV file on FTP Server

Considering you know how to use command line dataloader, first challenge would be how to get it worked using ANT. Below code snippet show how we can create ANT macro to invoke dataloader to extract data.

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Automate Command Line Dataloader using ANT with Dynamic arguments and SOQL query

As we know, there are multiple ways to load data inside Salesforce like using Workbench, Jitterbit, API etc… Salesforce also provides standard tool to load data into Salesforce using DataLoader. Dataloader by default supports User Interface or Command Line interface. Most of us already know that User interface based Dataloader needs manual interaction by end user. However if you want to automate data related operations, better choice would be Command Line Data Loader. Assuming you already have basic knowledge about how CLI Data loader works, I will go more advance in this article.

Automate Command Line Data Loader
Automate Command Line Data Loader

Following are basic steps for CLI Dataloader :

  1. Download and install DataLoader
  2. Generate Secret key file
  3. Generate Password on basis of Secret key generated
  4. Create “Process-conf.xml” (here is the problem)
  5. Create field mapping (sdl) file if required
  6. Execute Data loader from Command line

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Command line dataloader in Salesforce – Solve Common errors

I had this article in my list for long time and today i got chance to share with you all. Data Loader is great native tool provide by the Salesforce to insert, upsert, update, export and delete data. Standard Data Loader wizard needs interaction however there are many scenarios where we need to perform these data loading tasks repeatedly like every night 1:00 AM (Nightly Services) or something. So, for these situations we can use standard data loader tool from Command line.

In this article, i will explain in detail on how to use Data Loader from command line.

The most important part of setting up Command line Data loader is to generate the encrypted password using utility provided by the Data Loader.

Commandline Data Loader tools
Commandline Data Loader tools

This directory contains two utility batch file : “encrypt.bat” and “process.bat”

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