A Shortcut for Dealing with Complex Parent-Child CRM Data

by Jacob Hughes, Integration Technical Support Engineer, Pervasive Software, Inc.

Stuck on a complex integration problem such as parent child relationships for CRM targets? Try staging your child data in a delimited ASCII file, and performing lookups for the necessary relationship fields before uploading them to CRM applications like Salesforce or MS CRM. This follows the KISS principle.

I recently used this technique on a consulting project that I helped out on, and it resolved problems we were having with duplication in Salesforce due to the complexity of the event handlers needed to handle parent and child data cleanly all in one map.

The ASCII connector is one of the fastest, if not the fastest connector Pervasive has, so the sorting and filtering happened at lightning speed. By storing child data in an ASCII file, it makes your maps much simpler and doesn't add much wait time to the overall process. Staging data in ASCII files can actually speed up processing by Pervasive Data Profiler.