We have seen the MVC architecture of Force.com. The MVC model helps us separate the business logic from the display and data. Now, we can build an application on Force.com using the previous chapter. For an effective application, having correct data is as important as having efficient business logic. As we have already seen in Chapter 1, Getting Started with Force.com, Force.com is suitable for data-driven and process-driven applications, hence the data operations are massive. Force.com provides us with some really nice and efficient tools to manage, manipulate, and clean massive data per iteration. In this chapter we are going to learn:
- How to import data using the data loader
- The standard data management operations
- How to import data using wizard
- How to execute the data loader via command line
- Some lessons in Force.com IDs
So let's start playing with the data.
When we migrate an application on Force.com there is a very important process of migrating the data from the existing legacy system or spread sheets and loading it into the cloud application. To improve the data quality we also need to ensure that there are no duplicate entries and the data is clean.
Some basic data management operations are:
- Data export:
- Data can be exported for making periodic backups or downloading the entire data
- It can also be used to get the template to insert data
- Inserting data:
- We can insert data into existing standard and custom objects
- Also helpful in migrating users
- Updating data:
- Deleting ata:
- The deleting operation is used to free up legacy data and to remove erroneous data
We will be seeing the above operations using the data loader, using a wizard as well as using the command line interface.