Field & Object Mapping in Salesforce

Field Mapping: telling DayBack about your Salesforce objects

This article explains how to create a new calendar in DayBack and link it to one of your Salesforce objects by "mapping" each necessary field to a field in your object. You can create calendars for both standard and custom Salesforce objects. The article starts with a helpful video that guides you through the process.

To configure DayBack to work with your Salesforce objects, you mainly need to fill out a form on DayBack's source settings screen. Each object you map will appear as a separate "source" in the calendar, and you can choose which sources to display at any given time. DayBack provides a few standard objects by default when you first add it to your org, including Events, Tasks, and Campaigns, which you can use as mapping examples to create sources for your own objects.

If you're using Salesforce Scheduler, the default object will be your Service Appointments, which you can extend and customize, perhaps adding new objects alongside it to show your resources availability or vacation requests.

The Field Mapping form will describe the fields available in DayBack and a couple of required fields you may need to add to any custom objects. Feel free to disable any fields you don't need or aren't sure about; if there is no "enabled" checkbox beside a field, then the field is required for the calendar to function.

If you're the admin of your org, you're already an administrator in DayBack and clicking on "Settings" in the calendar's left-hand sidebar will reveal an "Administrator Settings" button that will let you configure sources. 

Field mapping: getting started

Here's a step-by-step walkthrough of creating a new calendar and starting your field mapping:

Having first created your new source you'll continue editing the calendar settings by mapping the fields DayBack needs to know about in order to show your object on the calendar.

Required fields

DayBack only requires a couple of fields in your object and these are likely only an issue for custom objects; even there, you probably already have these fields in your object:

• Start - the starting date or date/time of the object. If you only have one date field in your object, like a due date, use that field here. See the next major section below for information about changing date and time dislay
• Display - this is the field (or fields) that shows up when you see the event in the calendar: it's the name of your event, like "Meeting with Tim". 
• Title - this may be the same field as the first field you choose in Display, but this is the editable title that shows in the popover when you go to edit an item in the calendar. 

Date & Times in the Display Field

DayBack has a default display format for event start times that varies depending on the view. But you might prefer to have a consistent date and time display across all views. To achieve this, you can configure the display field setup for events when setting up your Salesforce objects in DayBack. This allows you to control how you want event times to be shown for that particular object.

.fc-event-time.time {
  display:none;
}

Then, you can add the start and end time into the display field with something like this:

<dbk-css style="font-weight:bold">StartDateTime</dbk-css> - <dbk-css style="font-weight:bold">EndDateTime</dbk-css>,
Subject,
Who.Name

Special field (status and resource)

The status and resource fields are a bit different in that the status field is used for color coding your item and the resource is used to assign it a column in the resource scheduling views. 

Status

DayBack will color-code your events according to the value in this field. This is most often a temporal attribute of the event, like "has it been started" or "has the patient checked in yet." But it can also be what you use to tell one type of work from another: some users color code by department, or work type. For others, this is the payment status of a job: green for paid, orange for pending, grey for canceled.

To get started, you can map status to any field in your table, even a picklist, and then adjust the list of possible statuses in DayBack's filters tab to match the values you'd like to see for status.

Here's a step-by-step walkthrough showing you how to map the status field in Salesforce.

More on this and on color-coding your items here:  Events Colors & Status

Resource

Resource scheduling is one of the real strengths of DayBack and you'll eventually want to read up on the available resource scheduling views here:  Resources Overview. But for now, you can map the resource to "Owner.Name" (without the quotes)--which is what DayBack does by default for your events and tasks. That's the owner of the item and will be assigned to the logged-in user if you leave the resource in DayBack blank. You can also map this to any text field or multi-value picklist. More on your options here: mapping the resource field.

Using custom fields

You can include custom fields in your calendar mapping. Just remember that Salesforce gives your custom field a suffix so if you have a custom field called "Sample", for example, the field's name in Salesforce is "Sample__c" (without the quotes).

Adding more fields to the calendar popover

You can go beyond the fields shown in DayBack's popover by adding additional fields; this great for including required fields you may need when creating new items. 

These are fields DayBack didn't think to create a space for and they'll appear on a drawer beside your event popover. These fields are exposed to DayBack's text filter and can be a great way to refine your calendar views with text filters saved as bookmarks.

Learn more about custom fields here: additional fields.