Import and extract data in Salesforce Marketing Cloud with File Drop Automations
Note on Data Extensions
This destination has been deprecated in favor of our standard SFMC destination, which now contains its own robust FTP drop that includes the automatic creation of Data Extensions and execution of Import Definitions.
This destination only uploads a file to the SFMC server. You are required to manually configure and run an Import Definition for that file.
Setup
To get started, you will need your FTP URL, username, and credentials. You can create an FTP user in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud console under Settings > Administration > Data Management > FTP Accounts.
Port 22 will always be used.
Supported authentication methods
We support three authentication methods:
- Username + password
- Username + SSH private key
- Username + SSH private key + passphrase
We support two formats for the SSH private key:
- OpenSSH
- RSA
Provide the full private key for the user, including the header and footer.
For example:
-----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----
<private key body>
<private key body>
<private key body>
-----END OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----
Syncing
This destination ignores the concept of additions, changes, removals and will send the full results of your model. For example, if your model has 1,000 records, your CSV results file will be 1,000 records.
File name
The file name field will allow you to specify which directory and the name of
the file that you want to name your results. The parent directory for the file
must exist. Import/ will be added to the beginning of the given path. For
example, with the configuration in the screenshot below, the file results.csv
will be written to path Import/results.csv.
You can also timestamp variables in the file name, surrounding each with {}.
We support these timestamp variables: YYYY, MM, DD, HH, mm. All dates
and times will be UTC.
For example: {YYYY}-{MM}-{DD}-{HH}-{mm}-result.csv.
Columns to sync
For this destination, we give you the ability to export all columns as they are represented in your model.
If you need remap the fields that you're exporting, maybe because you don't want
to alter your model, you can manually map fields. Only the fields that you map
will be exported in this instance. In this example, we're just exporting id,
email and location. These fields are mapped to the new fields in the CSV as
user_id, user_email and user_location respectfully. All other columns from your
results are ignored.
Format and encoding
The synced file will include a CSV header.
By default, the file will be saved in ASCII encoding. If there are any non-ASCII characters in your results, the file will be saved with utf-8 encoding.
The file will not contain a Byte Order Mark (BOM).
Other considerations
This destination will not respect any sorting that you have in your model. It will export the target file sorted by ID.
You will need to ensure that the file that you transmit is processed from the folder before the next sync runs, or else it will be overwritten with the next sync that uses the same filename.