Reltio Connect

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  • 1.  Loopback behavior of the Salesforce Connector

    Reltio Partner
    Posted 04-12-2022 14:49
    The Salesforce connector has a designed behavior of Posting back to Reltio anytime it receives a Post from Reltio.  As I discuss this further, consider another behavior it exhibits which is: When it Posts to Reltio, it does not update the LUD of its crosswalk. It only updates the Reltio Load Date. Since the Recency rule ignores the Reltio Load Date, the Recency rule will not respect updates from Salesforce. If other systems are updating the LUD with their Posts, updates from Salesforce via the connector will never win.

    But here's the issue; even if the connector did update the LUD of its crosswalk as it should, the loopback behavior would then become fundamentally problematic because the Post coming back from Salesforce will always carry a more recent timestamp (perhaps by just milliseconds) than the Post that went to Salesforce from Reltio. Therefore, with Recency as a strategy (which is quite common and popular), the Salesforce crosswalk will always win regardless of which source system provided the most recent bonafide post. E.g. suppose you had 5 systems all Posting to Reltio each updating their crosswalk LUD. As long as the Salesforce connector is in the ecosystem, no other system can ever win via Recency because Salesforce's loopback feature will always come back milliseconds later with its own Post, thereby claiming victory from a recency standpoint. 

    I wonder if anyone else who has implemented the connector has encountered similar issues and has thoughts on this.

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    Curt Pearlman
    PwC
    Agoura Hills CA
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  • 2.  RE: Loopback behavior of the Salesforce Connector

    Reltio Employee
    Posted 04-14-2022 09:26
    @Gaurav Gera are you able to weigh in on this?​

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    Chris Detzel
    Director of Customer Community and Engagement
    Reltio
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  • 3.  RE: Loopback behavior of the Salesforce Connector

    Reltio Employee
    Posted 04-15-2022 09:44
    Actually loopback feature shouldn't cause any issues. Salesforce connector takes win values, updates Salesforce objects and performs loopback request with same win values, so that it doesn't break user expectations in terms of values. But strictly speaking we may expect some collisions. For example, it's possible to change data for loopback Post by custom logic scripts. But such scenarios are requests from customers and it's expected.

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    Alexey Gamov
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  • 4.  RE: Loopback behavior of the Salesforce Connector

    Posted 12-20-2022 17:56
    @Curt Pearlman: We're in the object-mapping stage of standing up our connector for PoC purposes.  One of our test cases focuses on understanding the behavior of the connector w/regards to loopbacks.   I am curious, given the discussion/insight from this thread, did/have you experienced any loopback issues?  Thank you.​

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    Frank Zendejas
    Ferguson Enterprises
    Houston
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  • 5.  RE: Loopback behavior of the Salesforce Connector

    Reltio Partner
    Posted 12-20-2022 19:04
    Frank, if your question has to do with concern around forming an infinite loop, that is not really a concern. I'm a bit removed from that topic for a while now but if I recall the behavior correctly, if the OV was updated as a result of a post to the Salesforce crosswalk, then the connector will not propagate that update back to SF, thus it protects against an infinite loop. And it can do this by examining the Reltio Load Date values of all the crosswalks to see if the date on the Salesforce crosswalk is the most recent. If it isn't and Recency is employed for survivorship then the update from any other system will flow through the connector to Salesforce. And there, I think it bears close examination of which attribute(s) are being updated from the other sources, and whether Partial Override being used or not in the update. This can have an effect on how much of the update (i.e. one attribute or the whole record) from the other sources will be propagated to the OV and thus potentially to Salesforce. Pls have a look at a recent blog post from me on this very topic.  One other thing you want to be aware of when using the Salesforce connector and Reltio RDM. If your Salesforce records use drop down lists which I'm sure they do and those lists employ Codes that differ from the Values displayed, know that the connector does NOT reverse transcode reference data from the OV back into the intrinsic Salesforce Codes when sending records to Salesforce. Instead it simply sends the Canonical value held in RDM. Thus in order to make Salesforce react properly to RDM reference data it receives, you will be forced to set your Reltio RDM Canonical values to the often times arcane codes used in your Salesforce drop down lists. This can be a big gotcha. Just saying since you're doing a POC.

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    Curt Pearlman
    PwC
    Agoura Hills CA
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