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I have a journey that is using Salesforce Data as the entry event. SFMC automatically creates a data extension for that journey and automatically links it in Data Designer in the Sales and Service Cloud attribute group.

When using a Decision Split, I am using the Contact model that was automatically created. When I make a change in SalesCloud, I see that the data comes through into the Synchronized Data Extension. But when I look in the system generated data extension, the same field/value is not being updated in that journey DE. The Decision Split technically evaluates the data in the DE correctly, but the data is not the most up-to-date data.

The only solution I can think of is adding a primary key to that system generated DE and querying from the Synchronized DE with an update.

Shouldn't the journey DE get automatically updated when using Salesforce Data as the Entry Event?

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What you are seeing here is a typical example of Journey Data vs Contact Data. However confusing it might be, accessing the journey DE through the contact model does not automatically make it updated. I could add any data extension to the contact model, this will not make it automatically updated. Here I also do admit that the fact of these data extensions being automatically added to the Sales and Service Cloud attribute library can be slightly confusing - referring to the prior definition of Contact Data vs Journey Data.

The whole nature of the entry data extensions, being used for Salesforce Data Entry event is the fact of them only being updated by the trigger in Sales Cloud, whenever it injects a new contact into the journey. You would always need to make an active effort to keep journey entry data extensions updated, and in some cases it would also make perfect sense.

However in your case, where you need to reference your most recent data, you would want to use not the Sales and Service Cloud attribute group, but the attribute group with the same name as your Synchronised Data Source.

In my case, when I go to the Data Sources in Contact Builder, and select the Synchronised data source, I see this:

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Which can also be found when browsing Contact Data in a decision split:

enter image description here

Ensuring this being consistent across your data sources and your Contact Data, will provide you confidence in using the direct reference of your Synschronised Data Extensions.

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  • I ended up just querying the data from synchronized data extension into my data extension. For some reason I had the assumption that when using Salesforce Data as the entry, that SFMC would also use the Salesforce Data for the decision splits.
    – Jackson Chen
    Aug 23, 2019 at 21:21
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To answer your last point - no.

Journey Entry Data Extension content will always be static, updates to the existing rows would not be recognized by Journey Builder anyway.

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  • It's still using a Contact Data, I'm referencing to the data extension that was system generated so it would not only include just static data
    – Jackson Chen
    Aug 23, 2019 at 19:02

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