1. Understanding Import and Export Management for Sales and Fusion Service
  2. Best Practices for Round-Trip Export and Import

Best Practices for Round-Trip Export and Import

You export data and then import it into CX Sales and Fusion Service environment forming round-trip operation. You can perform round-trip operations within an CX Sales and Fusion Service environment or between two different CX Sales and Fusion Service environments.

Before performing a round-trip operation, you must consider the identifiers and configurations. Although you can import most data directly into a target environment, you must ensure that the configurations from your source environment have been replicated in the target environment. Additionally, system-generated identifiers can't be imported and must be excluded from either the export or the import during round trip.

Use of Identifier Values

When importing records during a round-trip operation, you must ensure that the record to which you're associating (for example, if you're importing a Contact and want to assign an Owner value) already exists in the target application. You can't provide an identifier for a record that hasn't already been imported. If you attempt to associate with a record which can't be uniquely identified by the user-key provided, an error is displayed.

CX Sales and Fusion Service uses these two types of identifiers:

  • Record IDs, which contain system-generated values.

  • Alternate keys, whose values are set by the user.

Record IDs

Record ID values are generated by the application when you create a record. During round trip, the target application assigns record ID values to all the imported records; you can't set these using a value contained in the input data file.

When performing a round-trip operation, you have two options:

  • You can exclude the record ID value during export.

  • You can ignore the ID value during import mapping.

Record ID values are generally named using the convention "Record Type ID". For example, Account ID, Opportunity ID, or Contact ID.

Alternate Keys

When importing data during a round-trip operation, you must use alternate key values to identify associations between records. The alternate key values that are available for a record in the source system can be included in the data file as they're set by the user and can be assigned the same value as the source system. The set of alternate key values that are available vary by object, but generally include one or more of the following:

  • Original System and Original System Reference

  • Record Number (for example Account Number, Opportunity Number)

  • Record Name (Custom Objects if field is marked as unique)

  • Email

Round-Trip Export and Import of Extensible Object and Attributes

If the object you have exported is a custom object or a standard object with custom attributes, then you must ensure that the object definition is identical between environments. This means that the custom object and attributes must exist in the target application and must use the same object and attribute names. During data import, if a difference in the object or attribute definition prevents the import of a record, then an error is generated and reported in the import logs. For example, if the length or data type of a field differs between the source and target applications, the data import operation may not complete.