http://theEnforcer.net/2008/08/using-email-as-an-external-id-for-contacts/ a force.com blog Tue, 17 Jan 2012 23:35:07 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.3 http://theEnforcer.net/2008/08/using-email-as-an-external-id-for-contacts/comment-page-1/#comment-22 Thomas Goldstein Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:41:09 +0000 http://theenforcer.net/?p=46#comment-22 As far as I know, this isn't needed (and my tests confirm this). As you said, only Custom fields can have an External ID, however, upserts also work with fields that have the "idLookup" property. And Email happens to have this property for the Lead and Contact tables (as detailed here: http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/api/apex_api.pdf). In other words, the only advantage of your system is that it'll save malformed (according to Salesforce) e-mail addresses. As far as I know, this isn’t needed (and my tests confirm this).
As you said, only Custom fields can have an External ID, however, upserts also work with fields that have the “idLookup” property. And Email happens to have this property for the Lead and Contact tables (as detailed here: http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/api/apex_api.pdf).
In other words, the only advantage of your system is that it’ll save malformed (according to Salesforce) e-mail addresses.

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