ProTip: Easily Update Internal And External Data Stores With The Upsert Functionality
GoFormz has many options for automatically routing your form data.
For instance:
Send data to a third-party app, like Google Sheets, Smartsheet or Salesforce
Store data in a database or a GoFormz DataSource
When sending data to a third-party app or database, several of our integrations support what we call an Upsert functionality. The Upsert functionality simplifies these workflows by automating the decision around whether an update or an insert is needed, resulting in data that is more accurate, more complete, and free of duplicates.
The value of Upserts is perhaps best illustrated with an example. Suppose you have a work order form that requires a customer contact name and phone number to be specified. You use Salesforce as your CRM, so you want to make sure that the contact information in each completed work order form is reflected in Salesforce. There is some logic involved in doing this correctly:
If this is a new contact, you want to add a new record in Salesforce;
If this contact already exists in Salesforce, you just want to update the existing record with new information from the form, rather than creating a duplicate contact
…This is where the Upsert comes in.
With the Upsert functionality, you don’t have to worry about implementing this logic — GoFormz handles it for you, and does the right thing every time. If your contact already exists in Salesforce, it will be updated; if it doesn’t, a new contact will be created. This ensures that your information is complete, up to date, and does not contain any duplicate entries.
Using the Upsert functionality
All you need for the Upsert to work properly is a field that uniquely identifies a record in your destination data store. This is how your workflow will determine whether the record already exists or not. Typically, this will be an ID number (for the Salesforce Contact example, this would be the Salesforce Contact ID) but it could be anything else, as long as it is unique.
Customer contacts in Salesforce are, of course, just one example — the same idea can be applied to many other types of data, and many other data destinations. Let’s take a look at two other examples:
Example use case - DataSources
Imagine you have a list of field technicians and their contact info stored in a GoFormz DataSource, which is used to pre-populate Drop Downs and auto-fill contact fields. However, you also allow write-ins, so that new field techs can type their names into the form, and existing field techs can update their contacts — and if they do make a change, you want it to immediately be reflected in the DataSource.
An Upsert workflow would work perfectly for this situation. Whenever a new field technician fills out a form, their data would automatically be added to the DataSource, so that next time their information would be available pre-populated Drop Downs and auto-fill contact fields. Similarly, when an existing field tech updates their phone number, the new phone number will immediately replace the old one in the DataSource.
Example use case - Integrated platforms
Imagine you keep track of your projects in Smartsheet, and each project has a list of tasks associated with it. With the Upsert functionality, you can use a single form to create or update project tasks — a task will be updated if it already exists in the sheet, and added if it does not.
Upsert workflows make sure that your form data gets to the right place within your data store of choice, while also maintaining data integrity and avoiding duplicates. This results in more complete and accurate data, as information is continually updated with the very latest data from the field. One of our customers calls this persistent process the “upward spiral of quality”.
GoFormz supports Upserts as part of many of our existing integrations, including Google Sheets, Office 365 Excel, Smartsheet, and more. We also support it with our internal GoFormz DataSources. And of course, our Professional Services team can build a custom Upsert integration for your favorite business app, as long as the app’s API supports such functionality.
Want to know more about the GoFormz Upsert functionality? Contact your GoFormz account manager for additional information and help getting started.
