Understanding Relationships (The Salesforce Ones)

​While I am all about personal development, and relationships. This blog is more aligned with the ones in your Salesforce Org than with yourself or others.

Knowing what objects connect to each other and how, is vital in reporting, integrations and so much you or others need to do.  

Keeping a diagram up to date seems to be a never ending nightmare of blocks and lines.  If you have OCD tendencies like myself, you can get lost in lining things up for hours.  

Salesforce has a scheme builder, but wait you can't export it nor save the layout.  Since we are being candid, I would rather eat glass than use this for an ERD (Entity Relationship Diagram).

How about in 5 minutes you could export all of your fields from all of your objects, and have a tidy list of lookup fields?  

Stop relying on diagrams and potentially outdated data model documents and pull down this information real-time. Then teach others how to interrupt the results.  Everyone will love you and you won't have to produce a single diagram.

1. Head over to https://cloudtoolkit.co/

2. Use the Scheme builder, and when it finishes export the results into a single tab Excel version.

3. Sort your field type column by field type, and boom!

The simple way to teach everyone is that the Object on the left is looking up to the object on the right in the type column -"Child to Parent". 

Another training point is that if you send this to users that are building reports, most of the time the report types will follow the same pattern as in this spreadsheet - "Object With Object".

---