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February 8, 2017

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Data Loader|Salesforce|Workbench
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Workbench in Salesforce

Workbench is a web-based tool which helps administrators and developers to interact with Salesforce for Data Insert, Update, Upsert, Delete and Export. It also supports the Undelete Program, Deploy, Retrieve, Rest Explorer and Apex Execute actions too. Workbench is an advanced tool that is built using JavaScript and PHP, where it supports more than 5 million records for Data manipulation! For any Data Manipulations in Salesforce, we have Data Loader. To update one or two records using Data loader, we HAVE to export .CSV file, modify the excel file and then load it. But in case of Workbench, we can update a single record; we only require the 15 digit UniqueId of the record and update the fields as required. This is one of the best functionality of Workbench when compared to Data loader.

Workbench

Data Management One of Workbench's best functionality is called Smart lookup, which helps you in replacing the VLOOKUP option in excel. Smart Lookup is used in case of Insert, Update, Upsert or Delete function and it is not mandatory, it will help you to provide Standard id lookup field value with Salesforce Id’s automatically. For example, if you have a CSV file for Case object to update existing records with different Case Owners, as regular practice we would extract the existing Case records including Case Owner field and then we update the Case Owner field with new Users as per requirement. However using Workbench we can update Case Owners information directly when API does it by looking up the Case Owner ID’s by using Smart lookup function. To get these benefits, first we have enable Smart Lookup feature in settings.

Workbench1

To enable Smart Lookup, here's the screen shots that will help you:

Workbench2
workbench3

Workbench is such a beautiful web tool which will makes Salesforce admin life simple and easy by replacing the Data Loader tool. In Salesforce, to extract  data related to Users with the Roles, Profiles and the Permission sets is easy. However to extract data for the Users who are assigned to Permission sets is not possible with Data loader. Howver, this requirement can be fulfilled using Workbench. I will explain how we can do that.

  1. Login to Workbench with Production or Sandbox environment
  2. Then go to the 'Queries' menu in the top as showed in the following screenshot
workbench4
          • Select SOQL Query option, and then select object name in the option Jump to with “PermissionSetAssignment”
image00-5
  • Select the required field for the listed items and view as option should “Bulk CSV” instead of “List” so that you can export the data in CSV format. Click on “Query” button as mentioned in the screenshot below. There will be an output of the PermissionSets assigned to Users in the Salesforce.
workbench6

Advantages of Workbench while using with Salesforce platform:

  • In the browser, it is easy to read a table because of the simplified result information.
  • It is easy to build a SOQl query quickly.
  • It is easy to build SOSL function.
  • Using Workbench, the Purge option permanently deletes items from the recycle bin; Use 15 digit unique ID
  • It is User friendly, Simple to use which saves your settings through the session.

As Workbench is neither Supported, nor a  Product of Salesforce, hence no support is provided by Salesforce. For any kind of support or issues we need to look for Open source communities.