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Activity › Forums › Salesforce® Discussions › What is an external ID in Salesforce? Which all field data types can be used as external IDs?

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  • Ratnakar

    Member
    March 14, 2018 at 2:32 PM

    Hi kapil,

    An external ID is a custom field that has the External ID attribute, meaning that it contains unique record identifiers from a system outside of Salesforce. External ID uniquely Identify a record outside of salesforce. We use external id when we are integrating salesforce with an external application.

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  • Archit

    Member
    March 14, 2018 at 3:32 PM

    Hello Kapil,

    External id is a unique record identifiers from a system outside of Salesforce. While importing data by data import wizard it can figure out duplicate records by the help of their external Id’s.

    Exploring the same :

    If any application that have data of employees (like empId, name,designation etc.) is now linking with Salesforce so when they both linked together and application’s data imported to Salesforce so at that time the empId of employees in existing application is considered as an external Id for Salesforce.

    Hope This Would Be Helpful

    Thanks!!

  • Parul

    Member
    September 11, 2018 at 6:41 PM

     

    Hi

    External ID
    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.

     

    Thanks

     

  • shariq

    Member
    September 15, 2018 at 1:31 PM

    Hi,

    For more understanding –

    An external ID is a custom field that has the External ID attribute, meaning that it contains unique record identifiers from a system outside of Salesforce.

    Maximum number of External IDs per object or entity. 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

    Hope this helps.

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