Forum Discussion
Trying to find out how to report an Access problem to support / or trying to find a solution
Hi all, I am new to the communities although I am a long time MS user, so here goes.
Over 6 months ago we ran into a problem the built in salesforce connector of Access. First release we noticed was 1908, since than all releases show the same problem ( tested up to 2003). For all I know it might not even be an access problem (although that would be strange since we tested on a variety of setups).
I tried to get this 'bug' registered to MS (or at least inform them about the problem) but up to now I have failed in doing so. I am running constantly in circles.
- I informed our reseller to no avail)
- I tried using the 365 portal with a service request, it got closed (they directed me to a paying phone where I got transferred from A to B to C back to A (who did no longer reply
) - I tried various forums
So now I just thought about asking how to report the problem.
Regarding the problem itself:
The bug we see in MS Access is that all the Field Size info’s for a table from Salesforce are wrong (they are always shown as a triple in size of the real value). So a salesforce field (like ShippingCity for example) that is 40 in size will show in Access as being 120 in size… This means that any field that is larger than 85 in size would no longer be a Short Text but suddenly becomes Long Text … This is causing a lot of issues and renders the connector useless (definitely when you are trying to do updates to salesforce)
I added some screenshots showing the problem very clear, wishing that I could report this to MS.
In the end we are now looking into third party solutions, how sad is that...
Regards
Peter
Mike SullivanMicrosoft
Hi Peter,
My apologies for the trouble you're experiencing.
I'm the original developer that worked on this feature and I've logged an issue on our end to track this. We updated the Salesforce driver at this time and it looks like this is a new issue introduced by this update.
Mike
Mike Sullivan Thanks for posting Mike, if the test or development team need more info or additional data or can't reproduce the problem, let me know.
Peter
DaneelsMedia have you checked if using a Pass through query maps correctly the fields .
Maybe you could create a PT ...retrieve some data and then use a make table to create a local (temp) table.
Check if the sizes now are correct
tsgiannis I don't think I fully understand your suggestion, where would my pass through query go? To an SQL server but that server doesn"t have access to the salesforce data? Doing a passthrough to salesforce direct? Don't think that is possible.
Please advice if I am overlooking something.
Peter
DaneelsMedia Let me understand something because from screenshots is not that clear.
When you work from Access "to" SalesForce you work with
- Linked tables ( i saw some on the screenshots )
- Pass through Queries
- Some API way ... it would be really interesting to share some info if that is the case
- Some other way... i suspect from your response that probably SalesForce exports the data to something like .csv or similar and you import them
In both cases 1 & 2 you need a driver to connect to SalesForce BE whatever that might be...if not and you are falling to cases 3 & 4 maybe SalesForce exports the data correctly but the importing module fails for some reason to recognize the datatype's length and doubles everything...(maybe something like 32bit-64bit)
It seems that SalesForce doesn't provide an ODBC driver (that's why the mixup...i saw the headlines ) but there are vendors providing ODBC drivers : https://success.salesforce.com/ideaview?id=08730000000BqquAAC so you might want to consider buying one.
DaneelsMedia Let's see if we can't get some attention to this. It may or may not be an Access issue, as you acknowledge, but it doesn't hurt to follow up as much as we can.
George Hepworth Much appreciated
DaneelsMedia I will report back if and when I hear anything, or perhaps someone from MS will be here to see the details. Good luck.
