How to Setup your Salesforce Connector

The Salesforce connector allows you to automatically export the data submitted with your form to your Salesforce.com account.

The Connector List

The 'Connectors' tab shows the list of the available connectors for the selected form.

1. To access the list, go to the 'forms' tab and click on the form you need to set up. This opens the form properties panel on the right-hand side.
2. Click on the 'Connectors' tab.
3. To setup your connector, click on 'configure'.

Salesforce Authentication

The first step consists of providing the Salesforce.com credentials that will allow the connector to create or update Salesforce records. You may use your own Salesforce login and password, or create a dedicated user with limited permissions.

Salesforce may also require you to use a security token in addition to your password. To learn more about the security token, and how to obtain it, please visit: https://na1.salesforce.com/help/doc/helpdef.jsp?target=user_security_token.htm (login required)

If the authentication was successful, you will be presented with the second step of the setup process, field mapping.

Field Mapping

The purpose of the field mapping process is to describe what information should be sent and where it should be stored in Saleforce.

The first time you create your connector you will see just one entry in the table. You can edit that entry and add more entries by clicking "Map a New Field".

Definitions:

Source Type:

'Webform' means that you are mapping a field in your web form to a Salesforce field.
'Static' means that you want to provide a fixed value for the Salesforce field.

Source Value:

Select your form field if you selected 'Webform' as the source type, or enter any text if you selected a 'Static' source type.

Salesforce Object:

Select the Salesforce object you want to create or update with the connector. Note that a form can edit or update more than one object.

Salesforce Field:

Select the Salesforce field that correspond to the form field (or static input) that you first selected.

Upsert:

The checkbox in the 'Upsert' column is used to define the key in update operation. For more information, read our documentation regarding updating Salesforce record.

Example:

Here's how you would map a simple contact form to a Salesforce Contact object:

• The 'Salutation', 'first name', 'last name', 'email' and 'title' fields are mapped to the corresponding fields in Salesforce.
• Here, all contacts created using the form will be linked to the same Account in Salesforce. The Account is defined in the connector using a Salesforce ID.
• The phone number is collected in the web form using 3 different fields (xxx-xxx-xxxx). The three fields are merged into the same Salesforce field.

Data Model Reference

The Data Model Reference for your organization can be accessed by clicking on the "data model reference" link in the "Field Mapping" section. It lists all the objects available to the connector, with data type information for each field. You may find this document helpful if you run into trouble getting your connector to work.

Required Fields

To successfully create a record in Salesforce, you must make sure that all required fields are properly mapped in the connector. Required fields are identified by the ¹ superscript character in the drop-down menus. You can also look at the data model reference, using the link provided in the connector.

There is however an exception to this rule regarding reference fields when creating two or more Salesforce objects. Refer to the "Creating Dependent Objects" section below.

Lookup Fields

Lookup fields are fields that reference another Salesforce object. For instance an Account drop-down menu in an Opportunity record. You can identify these fields in the data model reference. Their type is 'ID' and the corresponding object is listed in the 'Reference To' column. The connector does not resolve lookup field directly at this time, so when setting up your field mapping you must provide the record ID.

Note: You can easily obtain the ID of a record in Salesforce by opening it looking at the URL in your browser's address bar. For instance, if you see "https://na1.salesforce.com/00520000000ww0H", the record ID would be 00520000000ww0H.

Merging Fields

If you map more than one form field (or static text) to the same Saleforce field, the connector will automatically merge the data, separating values by a single space. For instance, you may have two fields, "first name" and "last name" mapped to a single Salesforce field "full name". Please note that fields are merged in the order that they appear in the connector.

Creating Dependent Objects

You can create more than one record in Salesforce with each form submission, simply by mapping your form fields to different Salesforce objects. When an object is supposed to hold a reference to another object defined in the connector, the connector will automatically populate the reference field when creating the records. This means that you usually don't need to specify the reference id (often called 'parentId') in the connector for the dependent object, even though it is indicated as a required field.

Records are created in the order they are defined in the connector, so a dependent object must be listed after the object it references. For instance, to attach a Note to a Lead, define the Lead first in the mapping, then the Note. To attach a file to a contact, define the Contact first, then the Attachment (see also 'file uploads and attachments' below).

File Uploads and Attachments

If you form contains a file upload field, you can attach the uploaded files to most Salesforce object by creating a dependent Attachment object.

You must first define in the connector the object that you are creating/updating. Here in the picture, a new Lead record.

Then map your file upload field twice. First to the Salesforce 'File Name' field, and again to the 'Body' field of the Attachment object. You can also provide a static value for the field name if you want.

Field Mapping and Repeated Sections

Repeatable sections in your web form can be handled in two different ways when sending the data to Salesforce:
1. You can merge the data into one Salesforce record, or:
2. You can create one record for each instance of the repeated section.

Let's say you have a repeatable 'Phone' field in your web form, allowing your respondents to enter more than one phone number if needed. The form is used to create or update a Contact record in Salesforce. It makes sense here to merge all the phone numbers into the one field in Salesforce available to store that information. So in that case you would chose the first option: 'merge data into one record'.

On the other hand, if you have a repeatable 'Contact' section, where a respondent can enter the contact information for more than one person. The contact section may contain several fields: name, address, email, etc... It does not make sense here to merge the different names into the name field of a single Contact record in Salesforce, so you would use the second option instead, to create a different record for each person.

The Connector Activity Log

The connector's activity log is particularly useful to troubleshoot configuration problems with your connector. To access it, go to the 'Connectors' tab for the desired form and click on the 'view log' link.