What's new in Elevent

Elevent for Salesforce v2.8 is out. It brings in all of a customer's addresses from Elevent, not just one, and gives you real control over where Elevent data lands in Salesforce: when you send an Elevent field to a field of your choosing, it now replaces the default instead of writing to both. The Field Mappings screen has been rebuilt to make all of that easier to see.

If you're upgrading and you've set up custom field mappings, read Before you upgrade below first.

Multiple Customer Addresses

Elevent customers can have a Billing address, a Mailing address and a Seasonal address. Until now, only one of them made it into Salesforce.

Now all three sync:

• Billing goes where it always has: the contact's (or person account's) Other Address, unless you've mapped it elsewhere.
• Mailing and Seasonal go to new Elevent Mailing and Elevent Seasonal fields. Your standard Salesforce Mailing Address is left alone, because the addresses your team has carefully collected in Salesforce are often the ones you trust most.

Add the new fields to your contact or person account page layouts to see them.


When a customer removes an address in Elevent, its fields are cleared in Salesforce. Existing customers' Mailing and Seasonal addresses fill in the next time that customer changes in Elevent; reprocessing older Elevent Updates won't fill them in.

Custom Field Mappings Now Replace the Default

The Field Mapping tool lets you send an Elevent field to a Salesforce field of your choosing. Before v2.8, Elevent kept updating the default field too, so you couldn't really stop Elevent from writing to it.

Now a custom mapping replaces the default. The default field keeps whatever value it already has, but Elevent stops updating it.

A few fields can't be remapped, because the app relies on them to match customers, create records and calculate totals: a contact's Elevent ID, Email, Last Name and Last Updated in Elevent, for example. These show a lock icon.


A Redesigned Field Mappings Screen

In Salesforce, switch to the Elevent app and open Field Mappings.


Each Elevent field now has one row with a single picker, a note of the default it replaces, search, and filters:

• Remapped: fields you've sent somewhere else. The default shown under each one is no longer updated.
• Needs attention: mappings the app can't apply, such as two Elevent fields sent to the same Salesforce field, or a field that's been deleted. Until you fix one, that Elevent value isn't saved anywhere, so fix these first. When a custom mapping collides with an active default, the default mapping wins. These problems are also recorded in Error Logs.
• Fixed: fields that can't be remapped.


Every change is checked before it's saved, and a change that would cause a problem is blocked with an explanation.

Before You Upgrade

If you use custom field mappings:

1. In Elevent Settings, turn off Enable Processing of Imported Data. Leave imports on so new data waits in line.
2. Upgrade.
3. Open Field Mappings and check Remapped and Needs attention on each object mapping. Update any flows, validation rules, reports or integrations that read a default field that's no longer updated.
4. Turn processing back on.

Upgrades can't be undone, so try it in a sandbox first if you have one. Full steps are in the Admin Guide under Updating the App.

Also in This Release

v2.8 includes the v2.7 changes:

• Payment details on Elevent Orders and their opportunities: payment method, last 4 digits and card expiration date. Full card numbers are never stored.
• SKU on merchandise products.

Bug Fixes:

• Number and Checkbox fields can now be chosen as custom mapping destinations.
• Choosing a different record type in the Field Mapping tool now saves, and custom objects now show their record types.

Elevent for Salesforce v2.5 is out. The headline feature is a much-needed feature that adds some additional settings you can set to have the Elevent app self-manage deletion and cleanup of older files. This is a huge piece towards making sure the Elevent for Salesforce app doesn't use more Salesforce storage space than it needs to.

Elevent Update Auto-Purging

When Elevent for Salesforce syncs data in from Elevent, it uses a 2-step process to make sure your data stays protected and up-to-date.

1. First, all the new data--customers (contacts), items purchased (opportunities), orders, etc. is imported into an object called Elevent Updates. This in in-progress data--nothing you'll see yet in the data you use.
2. Next, those Elevent Updates are processed. This is where the Elevent for Salesforce app checks to see if contacts and other data already exist, checks to make sure the new data is indeed newer, etc.

The history of these Elevent Updates is really useful when troubleshooting anything that doesn't look as expected. They don't get deleted after processing for that reason.

As the weeks and months pile up, those Elevent Updates can start to take up a lot of room in your very constrained Salesforce org. Auto-purging to the rescue.

In Salesforce, switch to the Elevent app.

In the Elevent Settings panel, you'll see the new Log Cleanup section.

Enable it (Highly recommended). The default retention period is 30 days, but you can change it. Press the button and tweak it to your liking.

Note this only auto-purges those in-progress records like Elevent Updates. This will not touch the customer and opportunity data you actually rely on. Also, it will only delete Elevent Updates that are Successful or Ignored--if something might have had an issue, those will remain until manually deleted.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug causing overuse of imported data when updating the LastUpdatedDateTime stamp. This was the main bug causing storage use to grow over time.
• Fixed a scheduled job status display bug: Job wouldn’t show as scheduled in the settings component even when it is.

This is a small patch to fix a single bug. This patch fixes the way Brands were importing so they always populate the correct brand(s) for events and showtimes.

Brands are a great way to automatically surface specific events on specific pages/calendars on your website.

With WordPress Version 1.6.0, we introduce some very welcome functionality--creating multi-part events gets a lot easier and they show more accurate timing and location info. We also add a long-awaited feature: the ability to sync html and formatted content from Elevent events into WordPress.

We also squashed some bugs, including a huge one that'll help guard against breaking your events if you find yourself fiddling with events and showtimes and the way they depend on each other.

Multi-part Events Truth Serum

Multi-part events are events that are composed of multiple, separate events like short films, one-act plays, individual comics, DJs, or opening acts. Tickets are sold to the block/line-up/program, but each individual work or performer has their own searchable landing page as well.

Because each 'sub-event' gets a full landing page and all of the images and info to feature them on your website, you still create events and schedule some sort of showtime to make them automatically sync into your website. That could cause some confusing display language around when and where each sub-event really happens--since it's really just a part of the multi-part event--that full program where tickets are sold.

Now, whenever a sub-event is part of a multi-event, each sub-event automatically inherit all the correct info from the multi-part event. They keep the info about the actual artists and the work, but the when and where all come from the multi-part event, like the venue, date, and start time.

Now, you don't have to care about when and how you schedule those sub-events. As long as they are in the near-future, they'll look and work like you want them to without another thought.

Revisit multi-part events here.

Import Custom HTML on Events

One of the few informational fields about Events that couldn't automatically sync into the website is this Custom HTML field.

Now, even formatted custom HTML from this field can securely sync into your website--a great option for those extended descriptions, summaries, bios, or programmer's notes.

Note: only text formatting is supported in this field--no images or embedded videos).

To actually see this field on your event landing pages, be sure to add this new field to your event page template(s).

Learn about customizing your event landing page templates here.

Special Bug Fix - Events Don't Need Showtimes

The #1 way we saw people causing ugly page errors was manually deleting either an event or a showtime without deleting both. An event or showtime without a partner would fail, well, ungracefully. Now, even if you manually delete one, you won't accidentally cause larger issues.

We created the option in Event Calendars to easily hide sub-events from displaying. The default calendar behaviour now hides sub-events. No more workarounds needed.

Bug Fixes:

Moved acf-field-group call for blocks to correct position; resolved conflicts with standalone ACF installations

The Elevent Calendar block and shortcode have come a long way--revisit them here.

Fix to make the 'Hide Legend' option function correctly on List mode (showtime buttons) on event landing pages.

When a customer with multiple ticket packages is using multiple packages at once to get tickets, we squashed some bugs to more strictly enforce all of the max rules that might be in effect.

This was a new-ish scenario when we replaced the more guided 'use-this-one-ticket-package-now' flow with the more open, 'use-all-ticket-packages-and-buy-tickets-at-the-same-time' flow.

This is why AI can't write our updates.

Bug fixes:

• Fix double slash in CSS link.

WordPress Plugin v1.3.1

Bug fixes

• Hide Sponsor heading from Elementor if there are no sponsors on the post
• Fixed the shortcode [elevent_promo_event_date] so it properly shows a date range instead of individual dates for events that are offered on more than 3 days.

• New endpoint added to the Elevent API to get all tickets: (api.goelevent.com/Ticket/All). Useful if you want to ingest all of the types of tickets you use and have used in the past into other systems (Is used by the Elevent Salesforce app).
• A column showing payment type has been added to the GL Code Transaction Export
• Added an icon for companion seats in reserved seating - seats for those who accompany someone in a mobility device.
• Performance improvements on pass and package widgets and box office merch
• Completed the swap over to elevent.app for our CDN
• Increased the length of time for the cash drawer change window to 30 seconds
• Added an 'items remaining' column to the Merchandise Sales Detail report--so you can track how many of each merch variant you should have on-hand.
• Officially retired some outdated features, including ticket package fulfillment mode, the advanced showtime scheduler, shared-screen mode for seat selection in the Box Office, and legacy merch.