Refresh SFDC Sandboxes and GS Connection

Related products: None

If you’re looking to refresh your Gainsight sandbox, there’s a great article here for how to do it: Refresh an existing sandbox. This feature allows you to refresh your Gainsight sandbox so that it has all the latest configuration and data from your production org. But if you have to refresh your Salesforce Sandbox?

If you’ve ever refreshed your Salesforce sandbox, you most likely ran into issues with your connections to your Gainsight sandbox. The challenge is Gainsight doesn’t recognize the new SFDC Sandbox.

What happens in the background when you refresh a SFDC Sanbox is SFDC removes the old instance and creates a brand new instance that matches your Prod instance. If you check the SFDC Org ID for the original sandbox and the new one, you’ll notice they are different. I found this post before in a SFDC forum that helps to explain this but I don’t think this information is listed in their support community:

 

https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/231425/what-exactly-does-refreshing-sandbox-do

During a refresh, what happens is that Salesforce creates a brand new org that contains all of the objects, fields, page layouts, record types, users, and so on that the source org has so that it is visually identical to the source org. This is referred to as the metadata, or simply the "data about data."

All sandbox copies go through this step. Sandboxes that are based on templates, and partial and full copies, also get some or all of the records copied. Records are simply referred to as "data."

As a concrete example, a custom field is metadata; it describes the properties of the field, such as what type of data it can hold, its maximum length, validation rules, and so on. It is data that does not belong to any specific record, but instead describes how specific records are laid out in the database.

In the activation process, Salesforce then takes the brand new org and marks it as the active version of the org, and the old org is flagged for deletion. At some future point in time (usually about 2 days), the old version of the org is permanently deleted from the database.

 

Within Gainsight’s SFDC connector, GS tracks the SFDC org it is connected to via the oauth login details. As described above, when you refresh your SFDC instance, the old sandbox disappears so Gainsight can no longer find this organization. To resolve this, you currently need to contact Gainsight to switch which SFDC sandbox Gainsight should connect to.

 

My ask is:

 

1. Can you display the SFDC Org ID on the connector screens. I know this data is not required to add the connection, but I think it will make it more helpful for admins to understand which SFDC org Gainsight is connected to. 

 

 

2. Can you show the SFDC Org ID on the main connector screen as well once the connection is established. This will help to identify which SFDC org the connector is connected to.

 

3. Can you also include a status indicator that shows whether the connection works? Ideally something that is similar to the rules engine status icons. If GS is able to find the SFDC org, this icon should show as green. If SFDC can’t find the org because it was refreshed and removed, it should show as the red sad face. 

 

 

4. If the smiley face turns red, would it be possible to edit the connection details (org ID and oath credentials) and then re-connect the org?

 

5. Once the SFDC sandbox connection is updated, it currently breaks are jobs. It looks like GS no longer recognizes the jobs that were previously created because they were connected to the old org. If all objects and fields are the same in the new SFDC sandbox, would it be possible to update all the previous jobs automatically? That way admins would not be required to rebuild them all?

 

Thank you,

 

Jean

@jean.nairon Thanks for sharing it here! Looks like you got sound knowledge on Connectors. Thanks!