Salesforce CRM is a comprehensive customer relationship management system designed to streamline and automate sales, marketing, and customer support processes. It offers a centralized platform for managing customer data, leads, and communication, enabling businesses to enhance productivity, drive growth, and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Salesforce is the world’s leading CRM software and enterprise cloud ecosystem. It helps your business grow into a more streamlined, effective and efficient organisation across sales, service, marketing and more.
With Databox, your most important Salesforce KPIs will be transformed into meaningful insights and delivered to your mobile, Apple Watch, TV display or Slack channels. One of the key benefits of Databox is the ability to combine multiple data sources in one place. This will help your team stay on top of the important metrics that drive your business.
Custom Salesforce metrics available with the use of Databox Metric Builder.
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For most Salesforce Basic metrics Databox is now purging history before inserting a fresh set of data for basic metrics from the Salesforce integration, so any changes made to data for past dates in the Salesforce CRM will be reflected in Databox for specific metrics.
The Salesforce Basic metrics that currently support changes for past dates in Salesforce are:
Databox can only pull 2000 rows of data from SalesForce API endpoints (this is where Databox fetches the data from) and sometimes even less due to API limitations. The maximum number of rows returned by SOQL queries over the REST API is 2000 rows. This is a Salesforce API limitation. More information is available here.
Timezone for SOQL queries can be changed by using the function ‘day_only(convertTimezone(CreatedDate))’ in SOQL queries in Databox. The solution is to change the data timezone by changing the date/time with a query to add/subtract hours based on the timezone. Based on Salesforce documentation, the day_only(convertTimezone(CreatedDate)) function should work.
Although it is possible to calculate metrics in the user’s timezone using SOQL queries, the timezone of the Salesforce CRM integration is set to UTC. In practical terms, the data may be returned in e.g.: New York time, but it will be interpreted and saved in the UTC timezone.
E.g.: SFDC Account in New York time, data point has: Date: 2024-05-23 01:00:00 UTC Value: 1
Basic Metric: value 1 is displayed for Today 2024-05-23 01:00:00 UTC = 1 Regular SOQL metric: value 1 is displayed for Today 2024-05-23 01:00:00 UTC = 1 Converted SOQL metric: value 1 is displayed for Yesterday 2024-05-22 21:00:00 UTC = 1
As seen in these examples, the data is being saved with the timestamp 9 pm UTC, because the integration is interpreting all dates returned by the query as being in UTC. While adjusting SOQL queries can help match the data that is expected to be displayed in Databox, such an adjustment essentially modifies the date of the data points.
When using a filter for the string ‘_RD_’ in Salesforce Metric Builder in Databox, it returns the same results as without the ‘_’ symbol. This is because Salesforce considers ( _ ) as any single character and that is why it is returning more rows. The escape sequence needs to be used for filtering: ‘\_RD\_’. You can read more on this here.
Yes, Salesforce REST API access needs to be enabled in Salesforce account settings. Learn how to enable API access in Salesforce here. API access needs to be enabled for Databox to be able to fetch data from the connected Salesforce account.
More information on this is available in the dedicated Help article here. Furthermore, information on Salesforce Editions with API access and those with no API access can be found here.
In Salesforce CRM, the SOQL query reports data in the actual time zone of the Salesforce account, whereas Salesforce data is synced in the UTC timezone in Databox. It is possible that data can be inaccurate/mismatched in Databox compared to Salesforce because not all values are included in results due to this characteristic.
The workaround solution is to change the data timezone by changing the date/time with a query to add/subtract hours based on the timezone. Based on Salesforce documentation, the day_only(convertTimezone(CreatedDate)) function should work in these cases.
Check what time zone is set on the Salesforce account when data is observed via the Salesforce User Interface. Check if the time zone set in the Salesforce account is other than the UTC time zone – namely, Salesforce supports data syncing in UTC for their API requests.
Salesforce stores and provides data through the SOQL query endpoint (which is the API endpoint that Databox uses) in the UTC time zone. However, Salesforce shows the values in the User Interface in the user’s time zone.
As a result, Databox is not able to make an API request with consideration to the user’s time zone – the API replies will always be in UTC time zone, so the date fields in the query need to be converted into the user’s time zone for data from Databox to match with the data in the Salesforce User Interface.
Check if the field, by which data is to be grouped, is a formula field. Formula fields cannot be grouped because of the limitation on Salesforce’s end (the field is set to not groupable). You can read more about it here. Salesforce users have the option to apply a workaround to make this data groupable by creating workflows that duplicate data into another field, which is groupable. You can read more about this approach here.
If you decide to apply such a workaround in Salesforce and have another field available with groupable data, it will then be possible to sync the given data into Databox.
You may notice a behavior where a Salesforce Custom Metric (Builder tab) is not summing values and where it displays the same (daily) values only. Additionally, a behavior may appear where data is not available for recent periods like This Month and Month to Date. For the Salesforce CRM Data Source, the SUM function requires GROUP to bind the value to the dimension. Meaning the first thing to do is to check if the dimension (by which the data is being pulled) is made ‘groupable’ via API. Since the Salesforce API does not allow this kind of query, Databox does not perform calls/requests like this. The system will perceive daily values as total values. This is why you might see daily values as total values. This means that the creation of a field that can be grouped and used with aggregation functions is necessary. Otherwise, there is only daily data returned. This is an API limitation and Databox relies on Salesforce calculations for displaying relevant values since Salesforce calculations are the most accurate. This documentation provides information denoting that it depends on the field type if grouping is allowed, so Databox can pull desirable values. Information that can help you create this new field properly is available in What makes a field not groupable. When you are testing or experimenting with queries in your Salesforce account, you can do it first here.
In conclusion, if certain data is not groupable, you will be able to identify such data by the fact that it is not being summed for total values. Furthermore, if you create a new field (dimension) in such scenarios, then to see this new field as a dimension in the Metric Builder dropdown, it needs proper permissions set in Salesforce to be visible via the API.
This error may occur when you are creating Custom metrics via Salesforce CRM Metric Builder using SOQL. The error will occur in the following scenarios: – The date field/column was not queried. This will lead to an error since the Date Range is a part of the request made. Databox needs to know what are the periods of fetch requests and hence the start and end date of the given Date Range need to be added to the query. – And/Or the LIMIT 2000 clause was not added at the end of the query.
To resolve this error, the LIMIT 2000 clause needs to be added to the query in the Salesforce Metric Builder in Databox.
LIMIT is an optional clause that can be added to a SOQL query to specify the maximum number of rows that are returned in the text query – up to 2,000 results. If unspecified, the default is the maximum 2,000 results. The default 2,000 results is the largest number of rows that can be returned for Salesforce API version 28.0 and later. More information on these limitations is available in Salesforce API Limits.
When applying filters in the process of creating Custom metrics for the Salesforce CRM Data Source with the Salesforce Metric Builder, Databox recommends putting the filter value into single inverted commas. For example, if the dimension value in Salesforce CRM is 876abc, the correct way to put the dimension value for the filter is: ‘876abc’.
The error gets displayed on the Datablocks (bottom right corner) for Custom metrics from the Salesforce Data Source. When a Salesforce Custom metric displays this error, this indicates that custom or non-existing objects are in use for the Custom metric. This can be checked by opening the given metric in the Salesforce Metric Builder and clicking on the dropdown menus to see which object disappears. If the object disappears from or is not present in the dropdown menu, that denotes that the object is non-existing or a custom object, which cannot be used to create a Custom metric.
The mentioned error may appear when creating a Custom metric using the Salesforce Builder (not SOQL). The error can occur when the groupable setting is set to ‘false’ on the Dimension used (in Salesforce), which means it can not be split up by the custom field. The solution is to set the groupable setting to ‘true’ in the Data Source and re-create the Custom metric in Databox. More information can be found here.
Some object fields have a field type that does not support grouping. You can not include fields with these field types in a GROUP BY clause. The Field object associated with DescribeSObjectResult has a groupable field that defines whether you can include the field in a GROUP BY clause or not.
When creating Custom metrics with Salesforce SOQL Metric Builder, the data needs to be grouped and the “day_only” function needs to be used for the date to make sure the date format is correct.
Here’s an example: SELECT day_only(CreatedDate) date, Count(Id) FROM Table GROUP BY day_only(CreatedDate)
Connecting Sandbox-type accounts in Databox is not possible as these accounts are used for testing development environments. Sandbox-type accounts are not supported via API on Salesforce’s end. This is a limitation on the Salesforce API level. You can read more about this here. Therefore, Databox does not support Sandbox-type accounts for Salesforce CRM integration.
The ‘Data Pull Error’ for Custom metrics from the Salesforce Data Source via Salesforce Metric Builder in Databox appears due to incorrect usage of the SUM function in the ‘Metric Operation’ field with the ‘Owner ID/Account ID’ metric. The SUM function used in the query would mean that the Owner IDs/Account IDs need to be summed together, which in this case is incorrect. The function in the ‘Metric Operation’ field should be COUNT so Databox gets the number of Owners/Accounts for the metric. The SUM function, to sum all these results, should be used in the ‘Data Aggregation’ field in the Metric Builder as this is the option through which the numbers that Databox fetches for each day are summed and calculated after getting the numbers for each day.