Data Migration Considerations – Audit Fields Part 1
In this series of blog posts, we will review the various challenges that companies typically face in a salesforce data migration project. Before we start analyzing the requirements and start planning the data migration initiatives, it helps to brainstorm the limitation that are inherent to the platform.
Audit Field
- CreatedByID
- CreatedDate
- LastModifiedbyID
- Last ModifiedDate
- Case: IsClosed
- Case: ClosedDate
- Case: MilestoneStatus
- Lead: IsConverted
- Lead: ConvertedDate
- Lead: ConvertedAccountId
- Lead: ConvertedContactId
- Lead: ConvertedOpportunityId
Are writable during data migration. This feature must be enabled by Salesforce Support, and requested by an administrator in the organization. In future releases of salesforce, this may be a settings that may not require calling support.
Given the number of calls salesforce receives on a daily basis from clients asking for this to be turned off for a certain period of time it won’t be surprising to see salesforce make this globally available configuration.
As of writing this article the objects that you can set these fields on are:
Of course all your Custom Objects
Some of the critical objects that do not support settingAudit Fields
- Campaign
- ContentVersion
- Group
- OpportunityCompetitor
- OpportunityContactRole
- OpportunityLineItem
- OpportunityLineItemSchedule
- OpportunityTeamMember
- Pricebook2
- PricebookEntry
- Product2
- Profile
- Quote
- User
- UserRole
Audit Fields are not allowed to be specified during update calls. This is an insert only operation. So it’s important to ensure that the values are specified during the insert operation. The LastModifiedDate/LastModifiedById seems to be the major bottleneck during data migration as any subsequent update to fill in information keeps updating that and we have as a rule of thumb always recommended that this be added to the list of knows issues for data migration and ask clients not to expect this data to be maintained.