As described in the title. I need to build reports in Tableau with data from salesforce and Tableau doesn't support fields with Text Area (long). So the only solution is the convert those fields to text Area.
I have checked that in the system, those fields actually contain data less than 4096 characters which can be fit into text area.
But are there any pitfalls in doing this? what are the other considerations?
What are the considerations and steps to Change Data Type from Text Area (Long) to Text Area
long-text-areatextarea
Related Solutions
Here is my solution
trigger UpdateCount on my_object__c (after insert,after update) {
list<Id> lpIdList = new list<Id>();
for(my_object__c lp : trigger.new){
if(trigger.isInsert){
if((lp.my_long_text_area__c != null)){
lpIdList.add(lp.Id);
}
}
if(trigger.isUpdate){
if((Trigger.oldMap.get(lp.Id).my_long_text_area__c != Trigger.newMap.get(lp.Id).my_long_text_area__c) && (Trigger.newMap.get(lp.Id).my_long_text_area__c != null)){
lpIdList.add(lp.Id);
}
}
}
list<my_object__c> lpList = [select id,Line_Count__c,my_long_text_area__c from my_object__c where id in:lpIdList];
for(LNP_Request__c lp:lpList){
list<String> totalLines = lp.my_long_text_area__c.split('\n');
lp.Line_Count__c = totalLines.size();
}
if(lpList.size()>0){
update lpList;
}
}
If you just change the Field Type from Rich Text to Long Text, Salesforce will take care of stripping out HTML tags while converting line breaks into new lines.
Just go to Setup and find your field, then click "Change Field Type".
When you select "Text Area (Long)", Salesforce will present a "Field Conversion" screen which asks you what you want to do with the HTML markup:
Select "Remove the HTML Markup. Only the content will be kept" , and click OK. Click Save.
I have tested this conversion, and it worked exactly as expected --- line breaks were converted into newlines, while all other HTML tags were stripped out and ignored. I had a Rich Text field, and for one of my records, the value looked like this:
And after converting the field to a Long Textarea, the value of the field for this record looks like this:
Best Answer
As mentioned by @cropredy textArea field only supports 255 characters. If any of the record data contains more than 255 characters there will be data loss for those fields. Please find the below article for considerations while changing the different datatypes.