Using Record Names Instead of Ids in ID and Lookup Fields

In a lot of cases our users face a situation when they don’t have a column of record Ids that must be used to update records or must be specified in the Lookup field to associate records with other records (Lookup or Master-detail fields).

XL-Connector 365 has a built in functionality of looking up record Ids based on their names. To make this possible, simply map a column of record names to either the Id field on your object or to any relational field (either lookup or master-detail), for example AccountId or OwnerId.

Here’s a simple example of changing the related account for a list of Contacts without having access to either Contact Ids or Account Ids. As you can see we only have Contact and Account names in the list:

Here are the mappings for this Update operation (note how we mapped the columns with names to the Id and master-detail fields in Salesforce):

With this setup, XL-Connector 365 will know to first lookup the Contact and Account Ids based on the corresponding names, and then use these Ids in the actual Update operation.

For standard objects that don’t have a Name field, the following fields will be used:

Case: Case Number
Event, Task, Action: Subject

Attention!
For reliable operation of the lookup functionality described in this post it is important that there are no duplicate record names in the system. If there are duplicates – there will be an error reported and the operation will not succeed.