Find & Replace action

DAP action

Last published at: 2023-07-21 13:06:00 UTC
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The Find & Replace action is available for the Advanced, Premium, and PDM editions.

Use the Find & Replace action to find records with a certain value in a field, and replace that value in bulk.

The value to search for on records can be a set value, or a value that follows a certain pattern and can be found by using a regular expression. The value that is searched for can be the entire value of a field, or part of it.

Then, on the found records, the value that was searched for can be replaced with a set value, or with a Field Variable‍ that then enters a different value per record. 

Find and replace values on records

  1. Select the records that you want to find and replace a value on in a list view, or by creating a new job.
  2. In the Action Launcher (top right in list view, or the next window in the DAP Job modal), select Find & Replace and click Next.
  3. In the next window, specify your find and replace action. 
    1. At Field, select the field that contains the value you want to replace.
    2. At Operator, select the operator you want to use to find the value, e.g. Ends With, Equals, or a regular expression.
    3. At Find, enter the value you want to search for, or the regular expression you want to use.
    4. If applicable, indicate whether the search should be case sensitive or not.
    5. At Replace with, enter the new value. You can enter a single value to replace all found values with, or a field variable‍ that can enter a different value on each record.
    6. Indicate the replacement method to use: replace the entire string, or replace the partial string.
      'Replace entire string' replaces the entire field value, even if you only searched for part of that value; 'Replace partial string' replaces only the value you entered at Find, not the entire value of the field.
    7. Click Add New Find & Replace if you want find and replace multiple values on the same set of records.
  4. Click Next.
  5. In the confirmation window, check the changes you will be making and click Start.
  6. If you ran the action from a list view: once the progress bar is at 100% completed, click Finish to return to the object overview.
    If you ran the action as a Job, you are returned to the Job Overview, where you can view the job results information via the Info button.

You have now replaced a value on all selected records.

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Select the right records

In the steps above, the Find & Replace action is performed on a set of records that was selected in list view in Salesforce. It is possible to select all your records, or a larger group, and then find the applicable records using the Field, Operator, and Find fields in the Find & Replace action. Do note however that contrary to the list view, the Find & Replace summary does not shown you an overview of all affected records. You might end up updating more records than you intended.

For example, to follow the example action from the steps above: you want to update all incorrectly spelled names such as 'Kin' and 'Tin' to 'Kim' and 'Tim'. But names such as 'Erin' or 'Kaitlin' should stay as they are. Searching for names ending in '-in' will find all these names.

If you have the DAP Audit Log‍ enabled, you can check back which records were updated and with which values.

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Fields of type Text Area Long or Text Area Rich cannot be used for Find & Replace.

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Exclude fields from finding & replacing

In the Action Library‍ you can set fields to be excluded from finding & replacing. This way users cannot update certain fields in bulk, but can still edit these fields on single records. Note that the excluded fields can still be set for updating in the Macros of these actions. Read more here‍.

Use Case

Watch an example of how you can use the Find & Replace action: