New to FormAssembly and playing around with it a bit today, and had a question.
Does Form Assembly allow for entering in fields that correspond with "Lookup" fields (e.g. Name, Organization) in Salesforce. This wasn't a feature of several form builder services i played around with previously, so I was wondering if this is the same case. So, for example, if I have an existing contact in record, if that contact filled out a particular form, would Salesforce recognize this contact and let the submission go through and automatically attach the form (a custom object in my case) to the contact's records? Previously, I would get an invalid error if I tried to do this. So what I ended up doing was leaving the standard Name field blank, creating a new Name field, and then once the submission went through, go into Salesforce and manually attach the record to a contact.
I would also like to know if the Organization/Account field can function the same way. For example, if a new user submits a form, what happens now (with other formbuilders) is that they are created as both a contact and an account (we are a nonprofit and previously used the one-to-one). Ideally, I'd like to create an Employer field in Form Assembly and have that correspond to the Account name field in Salesforce.
FormAssembly supports this. We have two features in the Salesforce connector that correspond to what you describe:
1. Update ( a Salesforce record ): you provide a set of criteria to use to identify a unique record in your Salesforce org. That record is then updated based on the field mappings you set. If it's not found, a new record is created ( if you so choose ) with the mappings you set.
2. Lookup ( a Salesforce record ): you provide a set of criteria to use to identify a unique record in your Salesforce org. That record's id can then be used in later mappings.
So, in your first example, you could 'lookup' the Contact's record, then use that value when setting the appropriate relationship field in your Custom object.
It's hard to talk about these sort of setups in the abstract, but from what you're describing above, it's quite similar to many other users' setups we have in FormAssembly.
If you haven't already seen it, these features are described in much much more detail here:
Drew- Thanks for the response. So should I always do "Update" (instead of create new) to cover contacts AND accounts that (1) have existing records in our system (2) don't have existing records in our system? You're right, it is hard to discuss these things in the abstract.
Sorry - I'll try to clarify what I'm trying to do so it makes more sense.
Example 1: I have a "Volunteer Application Form" created in Form Assembly who's fields match up with my "Volunteer Application" custom object in Salesforce. Ideally, what I want to happen is one of two things depending on the scenario:
1) User A, who may already have an existing record in Salesforce, submits the form, and the form is automatically attached to User A's contact page in Salesforce. 2) User B, who does not have an existing record in Salesforce, submits the Volunteer App form, Salesforce creates the contact based off of information in the form, and creates the custom object (Vol App) that attaches to the newly created contact page. Also in this case, I would want to set up a "Employer" field that would match up with "Account name" in Salesforce, regardless of whether or not that Account name exists in Salesforce.
Is this possible, and if so, how would I go about setting up the fields? Name and Account Name are both "Lookup" fields in salesforce, and my experience has been that I've received some sort of invalid data type.
In the meantime, I will look at the documents you linked to .
Ok I have solved the problem of linking forms with contacts (for the time being; instead of "update", i just chose create new).
The other issue still stands: How to get my "Employer" field in my form linked with the "Account Name" in Salesforce. When I try to do this, I get the id value of incorrect type problem. Any idea on how to fix this? Thanks
Sorry for the delay, didn't realize you hadn't opened a support request for this so we'd be notified to directly to your reply.
I'm not seeing the error you describe. Are you sure it's not a formatting error:
08/03/2011 05:53:35 PM SSN must be in this format: 999-99-9999. SFC-4148378 12341745 View Response Resend 08/03/2011 05:53:35 PM Created Contact record, with ID 0037000000vB8UyAAK SFC-4148377 12341745 08/03/2011 05:52:44 PM SSN must be in this format: 999-99-9999. SFC-4148370 12341745 08/03/2011 05:52:44 PM Created Contact record, with ID 0037000000vB8UjAAK SFC-4148369 12341745
SSN must be in this format: 999-99-9999.
would just mean you need to toss in a custom validator to your form that we can provide.
Happy to help further, Drew FormAssembly.com Support
Drew - Sorry, the recent SSN problems wasn't something I was concerned about (although I've set up validation in Salesforce so that it's 999-99-9999, and even though that's how I enter it in the form, I still get the error message:
It's more about these
Organization Name: id value of incorrect type: Facebook
These three I ended up solving by choosing create new instead of updating, but would like to know for the future.
08/03/2011 04:37:51 PM Connector configuration error. Attachment.ParentId is set to reference a parent object that could not be found. Error 08/03/2011 04:37:51 PM Required fields are missing: [LastName] Error 08/03/2011 04:37:51 PM INVALID_QUERY_FILTER_OPERATOR: SELECT Id FROM Contact WHERE ( AccountId = 'Facebook' ) and ( ^ ERROR at Row:1:Column:33 invalid ID field: Facebook
Additionally, the only format that Saleforce will accept for the "Date of Birth" is YYYY-MM-DD which, while not a problem, isn't standard. Salesforce is set up like MM/DD/YYYY, which is how I want it to, but if I try to do that in the Form, I get an invalid notification.
I think you must have your validation rules on the Salesforce side of things set not quite right, dates should work: http://screencast.com/t/QR16lpbgmA32 might be validation rules, or it might be a user specific thing ( like your API user's date setting is for Euro style dates, not US ) ... Salesforce always accepts ISO style dates YYYY-DD-MM.
For your organization name issue, you need to place the Salesforce id for an account in that field. A value like 000xxxx0000xx. You can have Salesforce support send you a list of the your Account's ids if you like ... if you're using a dropdown that makes it pretty easy to map.
If you're wanting to create a new account if it's not already present, you're looking a lot of extra mapping.