Modifying Salesforce.com System Fields during Data Migration

April 27th, 2009

Typically CreatedBy, CreatedDate, LastModifiedByID, LastModifiedDate, and a number of other fields on most objects are read-only for valid business and data-integrity reasons. However, during data migrations is it sometimes desirable to insert records with legacy dates and ids to match the source system.

You can contact Salesforce Support and they will enable this functionality for you for a limited time. Tell them you would like to enable “Create Audit Fields” on your org. This allows you to insert new records (not on update though) with dates and/or ids that you specify. They will typically only allow this functionality for a limited period of time (probably 2 weeks) but in some cases such as routinely copying data from external systems, they may enable this functionality permanently.

The objects that you can edit these fields on are:

Account
Opportunity
Contact
Lead
Case
Task
Event
Custom Objects

Categories: Salesforce

4 Comments

John Coppedge April 29th, 2009
That is very good info to know… I didn’t think it was possible!
Prashant Sakhuja June 11th, 2010
Jeff,
Thanks for posting this.

I have Audit Trail editing enabled for my production org.
Did not realize that it is enabled only for Inserts and not Updates.

I am syncing Case record between SFDC and legacy application. I was hoping to be able to update Last Modified by Id as well in SFDC when the case is modified by the the legacy app. This way the reports and dashboards would show up correctly, rather than everything marked as ‘Integration User’.

Any thoughts on ‘Last Modified By Id’ could be updated in SFDC for existing Cases.

Thanks
Prashant
Jeff Douglas June 12th, 2010
Prashant, you may want to look at doing something like this: http://www.forcedotcom.com/2009/10/setting-up-last-viewed-by-in-salesforce.html
Bryan September 27th, 2011
Thanks Jeff, this helped me realize that the Campaign object doesn’t have this option.