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Activity › Forums › Salesforce® Discussions › What are the External Ids in salesforce?

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  • Suraj

    Member
    April 4, 2017 at 5:41 AM

    Hi Saurabh,

    An External Id is a custom field.It contains unique record identifiers from a system outside of Salesforce. When you select this option, the Data Import Wizard detects existing records in Salesforce with external IDs that match those in the import file. This operation is not case-sensitive.

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  • shariq

    Member
    September 19, 2018 at 1:14 PM

    Hi,

    You can designate up to 25 External ID fields per object. External ID fields must be Custom text, number or email fields. External ID fields contain record IDs from systems outside Salesforce. You can use the upsert call to match against ExternalID fields during import or integration.

    Thanks

  • Parul

    Member
    September 19, 2018 at 1:55 PM

    Hi,

    This is a field that usually references an ID from another (external) system. For instance, if the customer has an Oracle Financials system that they will be linking with Salesforce, it may be easier for them to be able to refer to the Oracle ID of account records from within Salesforce. So they would create an external ID in Salesforce and they would load the Oracle ID into that field for each account. They can then refer to that ID field, rather than the Salesforce id.

    Additionally, if you have an external ID field, the field becomes searchable in the sidebar search. You also can use the upsert API call with the external ID to refer to records.

    You can have multiple records with the same external ID (though it is not recommended, as it will defeat the purpose of the external id)

    Thanks

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