Checkboxes in Salesforce - aaarrrgghhh!

Quite a few of our customer often want to update checkboxes in Salesforce. To the un-initiated a checkbox in salesforce is a boolean (basically a True or False and using it means you get a nice looking box on your form that is either ticked (for true) or not ticked (for false)).

As nice as these are, from an integration perspective they are a pain in the ****. Why? Well, Salesforce treats checkboxes as booleans - That means that when you export the information from Salesforce it comes out as a one or zero. And, when you pass information back in to Salesforce you can only set 0,1 or True/False. This gives two problems, firstly displaying pre-selected information in Clicktools and second, pushing information back in to Salesforce

So what options do you have?

1. If you are passing information in to a clicktools form you can only show information that is selected (i.e. true). That is until we can find a useable way of recognizing '0'.


2. If you are creating information have a radio question in Clicktools with the options True or False. This is ok, but not in all circumstances. Please note: These will not be successfully pre-populated from Salesforce in to Clicktools.
   
3. If you are creating or updating information have a one-option checkbox question, set the option to '1' and hide the question text.
   
4. If you want to use Clicktools to present Checkbox information in a form and then use the same form to update it please speak to us - we can do it, it just involves a little manual effort.

Option 3 is quite clever as it presents a checkbox that people can select. This involves putting the following html '<p style=color: white>1</p>' in against the Option value in Clicktools which ends up looking in the survey like this:

The option is set to be 1 but, it is displayed as white so it can't be seen by the person completing the form. It's an acceptable solution and looks ok. We will come up with something better though - soon.