Building Your First Integration Task in Informatica IICS: A Step-by-Step Walkthrough
The Ticket: A CSV Has to Become Salesforce Leads by 9 AM
An event vendor drops an export.csv of scanned badges into an SFTP folder overnight. Sales wants those names sitting in Salesforce as leads before the morning standup, deduplicated against existing contacts, with anything missing an email address flagged instead of silently dropped. Someone on the team has been doing this by hand in a spreadsheet for two conference cycles now, and it's exactly the kind of recurring, rules-based handoff Informatica IICS exists to take off a human's plate.
This walkthrough builds that task from an empty org, not the platform theory. If IICS is completely new territory, the syllabus behind SkyTrainings' course covers the fundamentals first; this piece assumes you already know what a connector and a transformation are and want to see them actually wired together.
Before Anything Else: Is the Secure Agent Actually Up?
Every mapping in this walkthrough depends on the Secure Agent, the small process installed inside the company network so IICS can reach that SFTP folder without opening it to the public internet. Check its status on the Runtime Environments page before building anything. It's an easy thing to skip, and the failure mode is quiet: a task built against a sleeping agent doesn't error out immediately, it just queues and never runs, and a beginner can lose an hour assuming the mapping itself is broken when the agent was the actual problem the whole time.
The Build, In Order
- 1
Create the Connections
File connector for the SFTP drop, Salesforce connector for the target org
- 2
Build the Mapping
Source and target objects, field by field
- 3
Clean with Expression
Trim whitespace, lowercase emails, standardize phone format
- 4
Split with Router
Valid rows to Salesforce, rows missing an email to a review queue
- 5
Wire into a Taskflow
Chain the mapping, add a schedule and a failure notification
The Expression transformation is doing more work here than it looks like at a glance. Badge-scan exports are notoriously inconsistent about casing and stray spaces, and Salesforce treats "Sales@Acme.com " and "sales@acme.com" as different values unless something upstream normalizes them first. Handling that in the mapping, once, is cheaper than handling it as a support ticket six months from now when someone asks why the same contact has two lead records.
Branching When a Row Fails Validation
Not every row in that CSV deserves the same treatment, which is where the Router transformation earns its place. A row with no email shouldn't just skip Salesforce silently; it should land somewhere a person can look at it.
That review queue can be as simple as a second file target the Router writes to. It's a small addition, but it's the difference between "the sync failed and nobody knows why" and "three rows needed a human, here they are."
Choosing Between the REST and Bulk API Connectors
The Salesforce connector in IICS actually exposes two ways to talk to the org, and picking wrong shows up as slowness or throttling, not an obvious error message.
REST API mode
Best for small, frequent loads; simple to set up; each record counts against the org's daily API call limit
Bulk API mode
Built for large batches; queues records asynchronously; the right call once a load regularly exceeds a few thousand rows
A few hundred badge scans a night runs fine over REST. The same task built for a company-wide trade show with fifty thousand scans should switch to Bulk mode, or it will spend the API call budget other integrations in that org are also relying on.
Scheduling It So Nobody Has to Remember
The Taskflow is what turns a mapping that works once into something that runs every night without a person kicking it off. Set the schedule for whenever the vendor's export actually lands, add an email notification on failure rather than success (a passing job nobody needs to hear about), and point the taskflow's error path at that same review-queue habit from the router.
One thing worth knowing if you're picking this up now rather than a year ago: Salesforce closed its roughly $8 billion acquisition of Informatica in November 2025, and current platform documentation has already started carrying the "Informatica from Salesforce" name. Nothing about the mechanics above changes because of it, but don't be surprised if a newer screenshot or help article looks slightly rebranded from what an older tutorial shows.
What This Actually Teaches
None of the individual pieces here, an Expression, a Router, a scheduled Taskflow, are exotic. What takes practice is sequencing them against a real, slightly messy source file instead of a clean demo dataset, and knowing which failure (a sleeping agent, an API limit, a bad email) is causing a given symptom. That's the part a live course environment gives that a written walkthrough can't fully replace.
Build this exact task, badge scans and all, inside SkyTrainings' Informatica Cloud IICS course.
