CODEWITHSUNDEEP
salesforce
Georgia
Georgia

Reputation: 27

How can i upsert to multiple external Id's in Salesforce?

I have an Account object in Salesforce and I have an custom field called ExternalText. I have marked the field as and External Id and

 "Set this field as the unique record identifier from an external system"

There are 2 accounts that have this field set to a value of E1 in Salesforce. I want to do an upsert from a csv file using DataLoader and the csv looks something like this:

  External   Description
  E1         Description 1
  E1         Description 2

But when i do the upsert i get the error:

 ExternalTest: more than one record found for external id field: [<id1>, <id2>]

I would have expected the Description field for both to be updated to Description 1 and then Description 2, so if i view the object in Salesforce the Description field would say Description 2 How can i do this ?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1258

Answers (1)

eyescream
eyescream

Reputation: 19637

You can't do it like that. Upsert has to find 0 or exactly 1 record with that external id. On 0 it'll try to create, on 1 it'll try to update, anything else - error.

For most normal usages you'll want fields marked as ext id to also be marked unique. If this isn't unique at source - you need different value in your field or bite the bullet, learn SF record IDs and do plain old query + update for example.

There's 1 edge case why ext id doesn't automatically mark field unique but if you rely on that technicality I'd say you have bigger problems. Imagine system where both UK and Germany created customer ID 123 and they want to push it to Salesforce. They both claim they were first and absolutely won't change their unique ID. So the trick is you can pull it off with right sharing rules. Upsert done with user that only sees UK data will work and update only UK customer. As I said - it's a technicality, in a "you think you're clever but you just made admin's job trickier" area.

Upvotes: 1

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