Today is Halloween, so to scare me, Jitterbit threw a “FillDataElements” error when I tried to build a Salesforce Insert operation and it didn’t like something I’d tried to do with a date.

Boo!

Luckily … I found a trick (rebuilding my Operation from scratch once I’d fixed the underlying problems) that brought me a treat (the error stopped appearing).

If Jitterbit gives you the following error:

FillDataElements() failed (bad data)

Which might possibly include some details along the lines of:

This occurs when constructing source data element “YOUR_SOURCE_COLUMN_NAME_HERE” for target node “root$transaction…

You might run across one of these posts from GetSatisfaction.com:

1. FillDataElements() failed (bad data)
2. Date Period Year out of Range - Format issue?

Reading them, I decided perhaps Jitterbit wasn’t happy with some combination of:

1. The fact that I’d declared the File Format for a column “TEST_DATE” of a CSV file source as a Date
2. The fact that some of the rows were NULL in the TEST_DATE column
3. Some typo I may have made when playing with scripting against the columns of the TEST_DATE column in my Transformation “condition” logic

I was sure I’d fixed everything that could possibly be wrong, but the message just wouldn’t stop appearing every time I hit “Test the transformation.”

I decided to try:

1. Rebuilding my File Format (copying it and changing all columns to String)
2. Starting over with a fresh Salesforce Insert Operation Wizard that referenced the new File Format

I’m not sure which of those two things fixed the problem, but was _ sweet as candy _ to see the error disappear.

May your Jitterbit errors be less frightening this Halloween and every other day!

🎃👻🍬