Discrepancies in Reports and Report Actions

I learned an interesting thing about reports today: What's displayed in a report can be different from what gets exported or from what gets added to a campaign. Let me try giving an example to clarify my statement.

Here's what we expect to happen:

1. Run a Leads report.
2. Review the data on the report. Let's say that the report shows 3 Leads.
3. Click Add to Campaign. The 3 Leads we saw are added to a campaign.

Here's what could actually happen:

1. Run a Leads report.
2. Review the data on the report. Let's say that the report shows 3 Leads.
3. Click Add to Campaign. Four (4) Leads, not 3 Leads as we just saw, are added to a campaign.
4. Return to the report. 4 Leads are now shown, instead of 3.
5. Click Export and complete the export. Five (5) Leads, not 4 Leads, are exported

The cause of this behavior is that when an action is performed on a report, namely Add to Campaign or Export, the report is run again in the background to as part of performing the action. In other words, what we see on the report before we export or add to a campaign can be thought of as a "preview" of what would happen after we perform an action.

In most cases this is probably a non-issue, but I thought the phenomenon was worth noting in the off case that someone is perplexed by an odd discrepancy between a report and a campaign member list or an export file.

Salesforce CSV Format for Report Exports Is Not IETF RFC 4180-compliant

At the time of writing this post, I believe the published standard for CSV file formatting is the IETF RFC 4180.

Also at the time of writing this post, I believe that the Summer 2010 version Salesforce does not produce IETF RFC 4180-compliant CSV files for exported reports.

Here are a few differences in the Salesforce CSV file:

• Salesforce uses a single LF ('\n') to start a new row of data instead of a CRLF ('\r\n').


• Salesforce exports line breaks in street addresses with just a LF instead of the CRLF specified by the RFC.

A few more noteworthy considerations for the Salesforce report CSV files:

• All values are delimited with double-quotes.


• Salesforce does double double-quotes for values that contain the double-quotes character, as stipulated in the RFC.


• For Text Area fields, Salesforce does convert line breaks in the field value to CRLF sequences, with the exception of native Street fields.


• There is a footer in the CSV file that does not contain any data at all, which may complicate straight data imports into other systems or programs like Microsoft Access.