Salesforce has always emphasized on declarative development since the beginning. The motto is that enterprise software should be easy to use for customers. With “clicks not code” development approach, Salesforce delivered Workflows, Process Builder & Flow. And we have really feasted on these tools to automate our business processes. Now going one step further, Salesforce has given us the ability to create object & fields along with its records, all at once, from a spreadsheet, with the introduction of Lightning Object Creator.
Lightning Object Creator
It’s a point-and-click platform tool which turns your spreadsheets into Objects, fields and records within minutes which makes your app building process easier and faster. It was announced in Dreamforce ’18. It is now generally available from August 2019.
Using this tool is a three step process. First upload the spreadsheet, verify cells mapping to Salesforce fields, define object properties and done. It’s just like one, two & three. You also have an option not to import records at the time of Object creation.
Note: This tool is only available in Lightning Experience and you cannot create any kind of relationship fields when using this tool.
The supported file types are conventional Excel spreadsheets in .xlsx format, .csv files; Google sheets or Office 365 files. Salesforce has given the end users the flexibility to use any of these spreadsheets which are commonly used by businesses.
So without further ado, let’s take a first look on getting started with this awesome tool. Here’s what we will be covering in this guide:
- Connect Salesforce Org to Lightning Object Creator
- Upload the Spreadsheet
- Define Object & Fields
- Define Object Properties & Create Custom Object
- Test Custom Object Creation
After going through this step-by-step guide you will realize that using Lightning Object Creator is a piece of cake and a delicious way to create objects and records in your Salesforce org.
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References & Useful URLs
- Blog – Turn Data Silos Into Modern Cloud Applications With Lightning Object Creator (5 mins) –https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2019/08/upload-spreadsheets-lightning-object-creator.html
- Help Article – Create a Custom Object from a Spreadsheet in Lightning Experience (5 mins) – https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=dev_objectcreate_task_lex_from_spreadsheet.htm&type=5