Forum Discussion
Trying to find out how to report an Access problem to support / or trying to find a solution
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.
tsgiannis Regarding you tech part of the question:
In our version of Access (we have an O365 E3 license) there is as standard (when you want to setup an external data source) a Salesforce connector. This connector is NOT part of all version of O365 Access.
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/link-to-or-import-data-from-salesforce-7375ffb6-1d6a-46f1-bb0c-c6ac3c58f5a0
This allows to access the Salesforce objects as linked (or copied) tables in our applications. You can do almost everything (select, insert, delete...) with the right permissions, so it really fits our case (provided it works of course
).DaneelsMedia Some light
Can you please check if the ODBC driver appears in the ODBC Data Source Administrator (Add) in the Control Panel.
If yes then you can create Pass Through queries just fine....
By the way .... things look bad from the start...1st link to get info about SalesForce ODBC driver and is broken
And by the way...there others with issues : https://developer.salesforce.com/forums/?id=9060G0000005jE9QAI it seems the connector is somewhat sensitive
tsgiannis No there isn't any ODBC driver showing as a data source, it is really embedded into MS-Access (I think it would be really hard for MS to limit use to a specific license plan if it was a standard ODBC driver).
For further info: read the URL I send earlier, it explains the configuration process in detail.
Peter
tsgiannis We are looking into other solutions (paying ones) that would indeed provide some kind of ODBC connection but that is kind of parallel track.
In the first place you would expect that standard provided functionality in a product works (and it did when we started out this type op integration) so that is why we did no pursue any other method of interaction with Salesforce.
As can be seen in my first post: Up to now I did not even succeed in getting the message across to MS (although I now got a message from a nice person (that is close to the development group of this component), so we keep our fingers cross that the dev team gets the message and finds something.
DaneelsMedia I am not sure i got the info how you link Access to Salesforce..
If some guy from MS took it over i reckon is a done deal....although i think is not an Access problem....its the "bridge" that "feeds" wrongly...
tsgiannis
Mike Sullivan is not just "some guy from Microsoft". He is, in fact, the person who built the SalesForce connector for Access originally.The problem is, as he noted, a regression in a recent update to the driver. It's being addressed now by someone on the MS Access team at Microsoft. It's unfortunate when things get broken. It's fortunate that the MS Access team does respond to reports of problems, though.
