Cloud Converter Update: Converting Your Dirt Bound Database to the Force.com Cloud is Even Easier! - February 17, 2009 at 7:02 pm

You can follow Reid Carlberg on Twitter.

I’ve been working on some Cloud Converter enhancements for the last few days. Everything is uploaded to Google Code and ready for you to use.

The details:

After an extremely helpful note from an early user, I have changed the way we connect to databases. It’s now more generic. This is a good thing. You specify your DB driver, credentials and query string and CC does the rest. Remember that you’ll need to import your database driver JAR file if you’re hitting something like Oracle, etc.

You can now specify an “external id” field type. This is extremely useful for tables that include a surrogate id (identity field, etc).

You can now create picklists from any data you like. So, for example, if you have a field which contains “red”, “yellow” or “blue”, and that field today is controlled by the UI rather than the DB, you can convert that into a picklist by specifying the field name and query.

You can now create lookup fields that reference other objects perfect for keeping track of your one-to-many type relationships.

You can use foreign keys to determine your lookup field values. This is the standard upsert based foreign key resolution that’s included as part of the regular salesforce API.

Data can now be loaded as either upsert or insert depending on your needs.

There’s a class that illustrates these pretty clearly – CloudConverterScript_Sample. Open it in your favorite IDE and you can take a look through how it all works. I’ve also added a road map section to the readme.txt to keep track of some longer-term goals.

Note: Cloud Converter is undergoing active development. If you have code modifications that you do not want overwritten by a simple update from Google Code, you should copy those off to a different project before downloading this latest update.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Love to hear them.

Please drop me a note at rcarlberg@modelmetrics.com.

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