Run SOQL with SFDX and Export Results to File

Running SOQL against salesforce orgs is quite easy with SFDX. All you have to do is -

sfdx force:data:soql:query -q "your_soql" -u="user@sfdc.com"

Or, you could save a few of your favourite SOQLs in a scripts folder in your salesforce project root folder and run them on demand.

Open root folder in VSCode
Create new file / select existing file. Type some SOQL (e.g. SELECT Id, Name FROM Account LIMIT 10) and select it
Ctrl+Shift+P to open command palette > type in sfdx.force.data.soql.query.selection

And.. you are done.

But, what if you want to format the results of the SOQL query to something more sane - like JSON for example. You can do that too.

sfdx force:data:soql:query -q "SELECT Id, Name FROM Account LIMIT 10" -u="user@sfdc.com" --json

Or, see results in CSV.

sfdx force:data:soql:query -q "SELECT Id, Name FROM Account LIMIT 10" -u="user@sfdc.com" -r=csv

While this is cool and all that, you cannot feed in SOQL to the sfdx command from a file or write to a file with just the sfdx utility. But, that what the operating system is for.

You can pipe the command to output results in whatever format you want (er, only CSV, JSON, or pretty print to a wierd format).

sfdx force:data:soql:query -q "SELECT Id, Name FROM Account LIMIT 10" -u="user@sfdc.com" -r=csv > results.csv

If you are that guy who believes in separation of concerns and strongly believes that SOQL should not be in files, but should be read from other files, we can do that too.

Just create a bat file (or a shell script) to -

read file contents (=SOQL) to a variable
execute SOQL
output formatted results to a file

All this with these two lines -

SET /p soql=<my_soql.txt
sfdx force:data:soql:query -q  "%soql%" -r=csv -u='user@sfdc.com' > c:\results\result1.csv

The above command runs ok as a batch file in command prompt (not Powershell).

The full list of magical things you can do with SOQL query in SFDX is right in front of you. All you need to do is -

sfdx force:data:soql:query -- help

Or, head over to the docs.

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