JSONDecodeError while accessing Salesforce's ContentNote content using simple-salesforce

Question

I am trying to access the content from the contentnote object. I queried ContentDocumentLink where i passed account id as LinkedEntityId and got the ContentDocumentId. Using ContentDocumentId, I queried the ContentNote. I am able to get the title, created date, created by, textpreview, and content.

For, content I am getting an url like this:

/services/data/v42.0/sobjects/ContentNote/0693s00000JBRj6AAH/Content

If I use the same ContentNote soql query in workbench or talend using salesforce object, I am able to get the coded notes message. But this is not same when I use simple-salesforce to query ContentNote.

I then use the simple_Salesforce object to get the note's content like this -

sf.ContentNote.get("0693s00000JBRj6AAH/Content")

this gives:

raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

I tried json.loads or json.dumps but no way I am able to remove the JSONDecodeError error.

Is there any other way to solve the problem? Am I retrieving the notes from ContentNote correctly??

Answer 1

Best guess (as I haven't used this code) from looking at the documentation such as Record Management:

# Returns all fields including the Content one as a dictionary
contentNote = sf.ContentNote.get('0693s00000JBRj6AAH')

# Content is base64 so will need to be decoded
contentInBase64 = contentNote["Content"];

If you are sure you are following the documentation and have invested several hours in trying to make this work and you still hit a problem, consider raising an issue here http://github.com/simple-salesforce/simple-salesforce/issues. While there hasn't been an update for several months, issues do seem to generate discussion.