Today’s Salesforce “Tool” Tip

dfeldt-describe — an amazing extracting field tool

I’m working on an exciting integration project and I just got a cool, new tool to put into my Salesforce belt that I want to share with you!

The scenario is that Company A acquired Company B and everyone needs to work out of the same system. So Company B is moving their data into Company A’s Salesforce org. In order to do this integration, we needed to know what already exists in the org.

If the field exists, the incoming data already has a home to go to and all we need to do is map the fields to each other. If the field does not exist, we can create a custom field to house the incoming data. I always think of Waze when I visualize data migrations. Each field that is going on the journey needs directions on where to go. So we have the “From” address in the Legacy system and the “To” address in Salesforce. And hopefully no cops are on the way.

Let’s get back to finding out what exists in Salesforce. The question is — do you want to do this the hard way or the easy way? The hard way is to copy and paste each field and any detail onto a spreadsheet. Snore! I’m sorry I fell asleep just telling you that method.
The EASY way to get all field information onto a spreadsheet is from a tool called “dfeldt-describe.” Not exactly a catchy name, but you’ll want to remember this one because it’s an AMAZING tool. Here’s the link!

Sign in and connect your org. You can either connect to a Production org or a Sandbox org, then click on Authenticate. Trust me — it’s super simple. Once you’re connected, you’ll see this screen.

Using the search box with the down arrow, select the object that you want to extract the fields from. It’s extracting from Schema within Salesforce. Click on Extract to Excel and it will be downloaded.

This is what the file looks like. Notice the 3 tabs at the bottom.

Let’s click on the Account-FIELDS tab. You will find all the fields that exist on the Account object. There’s “label” aka field name, “length” to tell you the # of characters allowed in the field, “name” is the API name ** BINGO — we got the exact address**, and way off to the right in column AX is “type” for data type. ISN’T THIS AMAZING!?!?

Now, if you click on the third tab, “ Account — PICKLISTS,” you can get all the picklist values for fields that have a Picklist or Multipicklist data type. In this screenshot, the field name is “Type” and the picklist values are, “ Advertising Agency, Assisted Living Facility, Association,” etc.

Since I had to compile a list of fields for several objects, I created a separate master file and only copied the field information that I needed. Check it out.

This was really easy to do and the extraction runs very quickly! Hope you enjoy this tool, but don’t thank me — thank Mike Dannenfeldt!!

Aloha, A Hui Hou! (Bye, until we meet again!)

Lizette