jq is some of the most underrated tools out there I think. It’s a command line JSON parser that makes it super easy to work with JSON on the command line and in turn makes developing small SalesforceDX tools a breeze. Today I needed to generate a CSV file of all fields from different objects for the integration team that doesn’t have access to Salesforce. Doing the describe is easy using the Salesforce REST API but when using jq different are usually on different lines like below (-r is a nifty switch for getting raw, unquoted strings).
$ sfdx force:schema:sobject:describe -s Account -u myorg --json | jq -r ".result.fields[] | .label, .name" Age Age__pc PO Box PO_Box__pc Postal Code Before City Postal_Code_Before_City__pc Street No Before Street Street_No_Before_Street__pc Archived State Archived_State__pc
The output is almost what I wanted but really wanted not to have to edit the file manually to build the output. Some quick googling and it appears that jq supports both CSV and tabular output from arrays. So fixing the issue was as simple as follows:
$ sfdx force:schema:sobject:describe -s Account -u myorg --json | jq -r ".result.fields[] | [.label, .name] | @csv" "Age","Age__pc" "PO Box","PO_Box__pc" "Postal Code Before City","Postal_Code_Before_City__pc" "Street No Before Street","Street_No_Before_Street__pc" "Archived State","Archived_State__pc"
This is so cool… Love it!!
