Marketo Custom Objects

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

Has anybody else played around with Marketo's Custom Objects feature? It's about a year old now, and I can't seem to find much discussion on it. We've recently started playing around with it in my org, and from our experience, it's incredibly buggy and a terrible user experience in general. My biggest qualm with it is how difficult it is to modify changes to any fields:

1. To edit a field on the custom object (e.g. changing the name, modifying the field type, etc), you cannot simply click "edit". You need to delete the field, re-create the field again with the changes you want, and re-publish the object.

2. To add insult to injury, you are unable to perform a modification and edit the object without needing to republish the object after every action. For instance, to delete the an existing field, you would expect the workflow to be:

- Delete "Field A"

- Create new field "Field AB"

- Republish the Custom Object

Marketo will NOT save ANY of those changes. In order to get Marketo to save them, you literally have to republish after each step. The workflow actually looks something like this:

- Delete "Field A"

- Republish Custom Object (to save action of deletion)

- Create new field "Field AB"

- Republish the Custom Object

Not the world's biggest deal if you only have to make one change, but it becomes a royal pain when you have several edits to do. This is akin to having to actively save an email or HTML template after every line item change! If anything, this actually seems like a bug to me, but after speaking with one of the support managers (specifically, Brandon Fong), it doesn't sound like it? Really terrible user experience all in all.

3. Similarly, if the field you wish to edit has already been populated with information, you're out of luck and are unable to delete, modify the type, or rename the field at all. I guess this is standard procedure with regular Marketo fields as well, but at least we are able to modify regular fields and rename to something like "DEPRECATED".

As far as I can tell, the only pros of the Marketo custom object is its REST API capabilities and the fact that it allows you to view information on the Lead level in a way that the Salesforce Custom Object never allowed you to do so. What are other folks' experience with this feature so far?

[Josh_Hill13]

Sounds like you should post these as Ideas.

I heard they are upgrading the feature.

[Anonymous]

Hi Michelle,

I have been using Custom Objects the moment I got access to MKTO instance. We also use a homegrown CRM so its much more challenging. 

We happen to notice a strange issue recently. I am wondering if you are able add new fields to custom objects? Once I add and publish one field, next one is very tricky or throws errors. Did you change anything recently or experience this ?

Thanks

Mahesh

[Anonymous]

What sort of errors are you experiencing?

[Anonymous]

Once I add a new field and publish, when I add another new field, other field that was added earlier becomes 'new' again. when I commit changes I get an error. We cannot add any more new fields to the custom object.

{"message":"mktDbException [PropelException]; msg = Unable to execute INSERT statement. [wrapped: Could not execute update [Native Error: Duplicate entry '1001-lastCourseLoginDate' for key 'db_attrib_map_field_u1'] [User Info: INSERT INTO db_attrib_map_field (DB_ATTRIB_MAP_ID,EXT_NAME,DB_ATTRIBUTE_ID,DB_OBJECT_ID,IS_READONLY,NOT_EXPORTABLE,STATUS,STATUS_REASON,EXT_LABEL,CREATED_AT,UPDATED_AT) VALUES (1001,'lastCourseLoginDate',859,1001,0,0,'active','Adding new field for custom attribute ID 859','Last Course Login Date','2016-10-11 16:08:11','2016-10-11 16:08:11')]] [[SQLException] nativeError = Duplicate entry '1001-lastCourseLoginDate' for key 'db_attrib_map_field_u1']","status":"operation failed","errorCode":null}
here are the screenshots.
https://pageshot.net/egnDQMuvXi9uN9c3/app-ab14.marketo.com
https://pageshot.net/9qFvu42C4Cz8Oe8S/app-ab14.marketo.com

thanks

Mahesh

[Anonymous]

Oh yes, we experienced that for a little bit. A bug on Marketo's side — they had to issue a patch for our instance. Talk to your Marketo support engineer.

[Anonymous]

Thanks. We finally got a patch for our instance as well. Took over 4 weeks.

Mahesh

[Rachel_Noble]

Hey Mahesh,

We have a homegrown CRM that writes to custom objects as well. When did you first notice this issue? We added a field to our custom object "successfully" - the field was added, but we haven't been able to populate it consistently through our API. Thought it was something on our end but wondering if we just shouldn't have added the fields?

Rachel

[Anonymous]

Rachel,

This happened about 4 weeks ago. We were able to add one field and publish, subsequent fields had the problem. prior to this we had a different issue one of the object was not 'visible' in the admin screen. Marketo support got back today that they have fixed the 'bug', I need to test. 

but we haven't been able to populate it consistently through our API. Thought it was something on our end but wondering if we just shouldn't have added the fields?    

Adding field will(should) not change the response of the API. Check your requests and responses one more time.  Often time it could be  field name or data type mismatch. we never had problems with consistency using API.

thanks

Mahesh