exporting field help text and description in bulk
Summary
You can create custom report types combining entity definition with field definition or entity particle to extract field metadata like descriptions and help text in Salesforce. However, due to limitations, no single report type can show both help text and description simultaneously. Using SOQL queries filtered by object is a practical alternative to retrieve these details, though it requires running separate queries per object. Power Query encounters similar limitations, highlighting trade-offs between reports and queries when exporting field metadata in bulk.
Takeaways
- Custom report types on entity definition can help export field descriptions or help text but not both together.
- SOQL queries filtered by object provide more flexible access to field metadata like inline help text and descriptions.
- You must use separate reports or queries for help text and descriptions then join data using durable IDs.
- Power Query faces similar limitations and can only access the entity definition table.
- Explore tooling API docs to find additional metadata fields useful for your Salesforce use cases.
TIL that you can create custom report type on entity definition + field definition to report on your fields! h/t : https://www.asagarwal.com/how-to-report-on-objects-and-fields-defined-in-salesforce/ and Anna Loughnan However I could not include field help text, though it is listed in the tooling api docs for fielddefinition then i tried a custom report type on entity definition with entity particle, and added field definition via lookup this worked in theory - i could include description and inline help text. but when i ran the report, field description remained blank. other folks said the report type worked for them, so i should test more as the report types would be really simple to use. so try that first. instead I ran a soql query to test it out, and this works select entitydefinition.label, inlinehelptext,fielddefinition.description,fielddefinition.label from entityparticle where entitydefinition.