1. Tutorial
Export and Manage Real-Time
Salesforce Entity Relationship
(ER) to Visio
TUTORIAL
Author: Mathieu Emanuelli
2. Tutorial
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................3
What is ERD............................................................................................................................................3
Benefits/Value Delivered........................................................................................................................3
INSTALL THE CONNECTOR ..................................................................................................................3
Pre requisites..........................................................................................................................................3
Connector setup......................................................................................................................................3
SETTING IN VISIO ...............................................................................................................................7
Pre requisites..........................................................................................................................................7
Visio Set-up.............................................................................................................................................7
REFERENCE ......................................................................................................................................16
CONTACTS .......................................................................................................................................16
3. 2
Tutorial
Executive Summary
We all know Salesforce solution which is the leading ones in several markets: CRM, Platform. Many consultancy
companies are delivering lots of projects providing important value to varied customers. In order to make
Salesforce project sustainable Deloitte has to deliver documentation explaining how the system is built or solutions
to allow customers to generate this kind of document by themselves.
Salesforce provides some tools to get the data model either natively included in Salesforce licenses such as Schema
builder or coming from the ecosystem through the Appexchange (here), the Salesforce partner platform as such.
No solution allows the user to extract the Salesforce data model in a shareable format that might be modified by
the end user. I love using Visio to make my ERD and I usually use it only for simplified logical data model as it can
be manipulated and shared with many people having Visio installed. Can we imagine getting Visio linked directly to
Salesforce to get physical data model in one click?
The purpose of this tutorial is to explain how it is possible to make that dream come true: Connecting Salesforce
with Visio and extracting physical data model with all attributes by object containing identification of primary and
foreign key for all objects.
4. 3
Tutorial
INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS ERD
An entity relationship diagram (ERD) shows the relationships of entity sets stored in a database. An entity in this
context is a component of data. In other words, ER diagrams illustrate the logical structure of databases.
BENEFITS/VALUE DELIVERED
Though it may not be most attractive feature, Salesforce has a powerful Schema Builder tool that can be used to
format complex entity-relationship (ER) diagrams. Unfortunately, accessing these diagrams from outside
Salesforce—in a program like Visio, for example—can be a major issue. The status quo for this sort of operation
involves numerous tedious and inefficient steps that lead to frustration and wasted time.
.
INSTALL THE CONNECTOR
PRE REQUISITES
Before you begin, download and install the DataDirect for ODBC Salesforce Driver. Make sure the version of the
driver you use matches your version of Visio—for example, a 32-bit Visio installation requires the 32-bit DataDirect
driver. After the driver is installed, open the ODBC Administrator tool and establish your connection to Salesforce.
CONNECTOR SETUP
Run ODBC Connector and select Salesforce as connector
8. 7
Tutorial
SETTING IN VISIO
PRE REQUISITES
You need to install Visio 2010 to run all the whole settings.
VISIO SET-UP
Create new document
Select Software and database
