Have you used RForcecom to connect R to Salesforce? It’s really cool, and thanks to it using Bulk API, it’s absolutely rapid.

Anyway, I recently came across a problem when trying to query records which had been edited based on the timestamp.

I wanted to do something like this:

time_now<-Sys.time()
q <- paste0("select Id from opportunity where LastModifiedDate > ",time_now)
updated_ids<-rforcecom.query(session,q);

However, the Salesforce time format does not appear to match any of the POSIXlt or POSIXct formats in R (please correct me if I’m wrong!).The problem appears to be that R datetimes are generally similar to this:

“2016-11-12 12:15:32 GMT”

whereas the Salesforce format has a “T” (between the date and time) and a “Z” (after the time) in there for good measure.

“2016-11-12T12:15:32Z”

I spent a while trying to do an R conversion, then after some minor irritation just did my own hack function which appears to work:

convertToSalesforceTime<-function(mytime)
{ 
output<-paste0(as.Date(mytime),"T",strftime(mytime,format='%H:%M:%S'),"Z")
return(output)
}

Now, if you do the code in full as below, you can query using RForcecom and only select records within certain time periods!

# Assume already logged in to the API... 
# run the function
convertToSalesforceTime<-function(mytime)
{ 
output<-paste0(as.Date(mytime),"T",strftime(mytime,format='%H:%M:%S'),"Z")
return(output)
}
# get the time you want to query
time_now<-Sys.time()
# convert it so Salesforce is happy
sf_time_now<-convertToSalesforceTime(time_now)
# query Salesforce
q <- paste0("select Id from opportunity where LastModifiedDate > ",time_now)
updated_ids<-rforcecom.query(session,q)

I’m sure there’s a real way around this but I couldn’t find it on Google, so this may prove helpful to someone.

Also, I believe the T and Z are something to do with time zone, so please take extra care when working across multiple timezones.