Flow steps to create/update/delete custom object instance

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Now that we can create custom objects, it would be very efficient to be able to create custom object flows through flow steps, exactly as we can do with tasks.

For each custom object defined in the admin, we would need 3 flow steps:

• Create (would take all the fields as input)
• Update (would require the UID + the fields to be updated)
• Delete (would required the UID)

The create/update could also be replaced with 1 upsert one.

Obviously, if it's a SFDC custom objects, the fields available would have to be set through mapping.

With regards to Marketo custom objects, all fields created in Marketo should be available to be set in the flow steps.

All the fields of the custom objects could be set with tokens.

Typical usage : I create a custom object : product interest, with a few fields (Time frame, quantities). I Create the same fields at lead level, that I use in a form. Once a lead fills out the form, I create a custom instance and populate the fields with the lead tokens.

We should also be able to update them, though the same mechanism.

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

A broader and more powerful feature would be this idea   that would enable to create a custom object entry with a webhook.

-Greg

[Robb_Barrett]

Greg, I'm at a point where the exact use case you mentioned is relevant.  Do you have an explanation of how you currently accomplish this?  We need to track product interests and we have far too many to track by adding fields into the Lead record.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Robb,

I see 2 workarounds here:

• Use a non Marketo form on your site and some server side REST API call in you CMS to insert the custom object instance in Marketo. I never tried this approach, but it should be possible to make this work, although you have a time race issue as before the REST API call can insert the custom object, you need to make sure that the lead has been inserted first. And also, as you do not use a Marketo form, you loose some functionality.
• Use a few lead fields to capture a product interest and some REST API to look at all the form fill out activities, get the data that was filled in and recreate the custom object. This one would be probably the most robust way of doing it. In order to optimize the number of API calls, you may not want to run it in real time, although you could, using a webhook to trigger the REST API call.
• Use a CRM custom object and a few lead fields to capture the data. When the lead fills out a form, it is sent to the CRM where some trigger and/or workflows will create the custom object instance that will be sent back to Marketo on next sync (We tried this one on SFDC. The drawback is that when you capture 1 product interest, you need to have if processed to the CRM before you can capture another one

-Greg

[Jessie_Ye]

http://developers.marketo.com/rest-api/lead-database/custom-objects/#delete

Deleting records is very straightforward. Just select your deleteBy mode, either idField or dedupeFields, and include the corresponding fields in each of the records in your input array.

Need functionality - delete all records in a custom object without listing specific records for the "deleteBy" field. Without deleting the custom object.

[Kenny_Elkington]

We have a project underway which will indirectly support this.  Stay tuned

[Mike_Crook7]

@Kenny_Elkington Is there any update on the aforementioned project?

[Kenny_Elkington]

@Mike_Crook7  Self-Service Flow Steps is currently in closed beta.  This will allow customers and partners to implement services that can be deployed as flow steps within Marketo.  There's some development required, but you can build a service to call our custom object apis in order to perform CRUD operations on custom objects.  You can read more here: https://github.com/adobe/Marketo-SSFS-Service-Provider-Interface

[JoseSAND]

Here you have an implementation of what you need.

https://www.flowsteps.io/flowsteps/marketo-custom-objects/