I am new to Salesforce and hope to begin developing ASAP. I am currently testing a theory...I want to use either Contacts or a Custom Object which will have another Custom Object (Special Activities) related list. I want to populate the records in Special Activities from a CSV file, this is exported from an external system and will be uploaded via the DataLoader.
The Special Activities is related to Contacts (or the other objects) via a Lookup Relationship obviously on ID. I can display the email from the Contacts etc on Special Relationship via a formula field however my external export file only contains an email as a reference and a formula field does not allow me to map via the Data Loader (obviously)...Can anyone suggest how I get around this using Salesforce?
Thanks - unfortunately my current thinking means I have to export the Contact ID/Email to a file from Salesforce and then merge with the other csv file before reimporting into Salesforce using the ID - this is long winded and I would struggle to automate nicely.
EDIT : I found exactly the functionality I need via the dataloader.io site, see the link: https://dataloader.io/using-import-lookups. I would like to replicate this in dataloader to automate imports