The On Demand Model: Multi-tenancy & Subscription: The benefit of coding in the CLOUD is that you learn how to write more efficient code and waste fewer resources.
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Saturday, March 28, 2015
External ID's in Salesforce
What is External ID?
When importing data into Force.com apps, you can use External IDs to prevent duplicate records from being created as a result of the import operation. It allows use of relationships defined in legacy systems when importing data into Force.com apps.
Considerations
It is a flag that can be added to a custom field to indicate that it should be indexed and treated as an ID.
It is a user-defined cross-referenced field.
It can be created for custom field type (Text, Number or Email ONLY).
Each object can have up to 7 (seven) external Ids (as of Spring '15).
Configure UPSERT action to traverse object relationships defined in your Force.com app, but use External Id's from legacy system to discover Force.com record ID's.
Benefits
It helps improve Report and API SOQL performance.
It can be used with UPSERT DML operation to seamlessly integrate apps with other systems.
No need to know Force.com record Id's to load data.
Very convenient for data integrations and migrations.
What is UPSERT?
UPSERT is an API function that combines INSERT and UPDATE into a single call. It uses an indexed custom field or External Id to determine whether to create a new object or update an existing object.
If the External Id is not matched, then a new object is created.
If the External Id is matched once, then the existing object is updated.
If the External Id is matched multiple times, then an error is reported.
Use UPSERT when importing data to prevent the creation of duplicates.