Tag: Command line Dataloader

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.

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.

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.

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