Can anyone confirm that the only special characters allowed for External IDs via the API are underscore and hyphen? I can find documentation confirming this for REST, but not for SOAP, which is what we're using. Interestingly, I was able to update the External ID via CSV to an apparently valid value that contained all sorts of special characters, but it appears the API might have different rules, which probably makes sense.

Anything going through a web protocol will have issues with special characters.

Don't do it. There are, but don't. If you change it to something you can't eid on, you're stuck renaming.

I should mention the test I did was in Sandbox. 🙂 I agree as a general rule for sure that we're not intentionally trying to put special characters into things and we avoid them where possible. I just didn't think about decimal points being an issue at first, though duh it makes sense since that could probably mess up a URL somewhere. Thank you both!

They are probably okay. But pipes | certainly are not. Ask me how I know 🤣

Is there a character limit on External IDs through the SOAP API? We made changes that pushed our typical Ext ID from 24-28 characters up over 30 characters and now we're having problems pushing it through. Is 30 characters the limit? That seems really small.

I have not tried with that long of ids. But curious, why so long? Can't cut them down without losing data?

To make them unique. We're doing a bunch of aggregation based on another data source and we need to build some intelligence into them for uniqueness.