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gmaddock Importing: Best method for setting 'Created By' for legacy data?
I'm new to salesforce, and working on importing data from a legacy app into salesforce so our team will have it - at the moment this is mostly Note objects related to Accounts.
My difficulty is deciding on how to handle WHO wrote the initial note, when that user is no longer with our organization,
and thus won't have a Salesforce account.
As it stands, you can't extend the notes object, so I can't add another field to store that data. I could import them
all under one of our Sales Managers names, but that would be less than ideal. I could also create a new "Legacy"
user and import them all under that. Slightly better, but also less than ideal because it 'wastes' a user license.
Any suggestions would be appriciated!
Most orgs have a data load user / integration user, which does data load-type tasks, you could probably leave this assigned to such a user, which you will find use for on/off if migration / import will be an on-going activity.
If you're conscious of licences, you could deactivate this 'Legacy' User, but change the Owner to one of your existing guys, so that its still visible via sharing rules to other folks on the org.
You need to request Salesforce to make CreatedBy and CreatedDate fields writeable, which they can do for a limited data migration window.
Thanks for the feedback. My ultimate answer to the legacy-user issue was setting them all to one, existing,
current default user. Its imperfect, but it's good enough in this case.
The issue of being able to set CreatedById and CreatedDate are still up in the air. I contacted
support, and they were able to turn this on for some other tables, but said that it was not possible
to do for the Note table. Anybody have a resource about *why* that is?
They said it was because "it is not an object", but I'm not familiar enough with the API to
understand why that means that those fields only cannot be written to.