SFDX Salesforce CLI : Update a field to NULL

Question

I have the following CSV of 12 Account records.

As can be seen, I am deliberately setting the name to NULL for an Account record (highlighted).

I am using the following SFDX/Salesforce CLI command to update these records and was expecting the highlighted record's name to be set as NULL or atleast throw an error complaining that the Name is a required field.

sfdx force:data:bulk:upsert  -u [email protected] -s Account -f ./Output/Account.csv -i Id

But the bulk API simply executes job and states that all the 12 records have been successfully processed.

The record's name which I expected to be set to NULL remains unchanged.

I am aware that we have settings in SQL Data Loader where in we indicate that the NULL values are to be allowed.

Do we have any settings like that in SFDX/Salesforce CLI ?

Answer 1

To set a field to null, you need to use the "magic" value #N/A. This instructs the bulk API that you are intentionally updating to a null value. This is outlined in the documentation.

Empty field values are ignored when you update records. To set a field value to null, use a field value of #N/A.

To be clear, this is a feature of the Bulk API, and not a feature of SFDX CLI. Any clients that use Bulk API must adhere to this rule.