How to Extract Attachments from Salesforce

This week the "Salesforce Power User" board had a question about how to easily extract attachments so I took 10 minutes and coded up a solution. The solution uses www.capstorm.com's free SQLForce/Jython tool that has been around for years. I use it with clients every day to write one-off data manipulation scripts and for scheduled jobs that scrub and report on SFDC data. Every admin with scripting skills should have this tool in their back pocket.

Enough self-promotion...here's the solution...
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"""
Extract attachments from Salesforce and put them into regular files.
"""

import SQLForce
import os
import base64

##
## Put all attachments into this directory. A subdirectory will be created for each
## unique parent id. Attachments will be named the same as the "name" field in Salesforce.
##
outputDir="C:/tmp/attachments"

##
## SOQL that find the parent record ids where we want the attachments.
## Change this variable to find the owner's of attachments you want to extract.
##
attachmentParentSOQL="""
    SELECT id FROM Account WHERE name LIKE 'Z%' LIMIT 5
"""

if not os.path.exists(outputDir):
    os.makedirs(outputDir)

def extractAttachments( session, parentIds, outputDir):
 
 
    extractSOQL = "SELECT id, parentId, body, contentType, isPrivate, name FROM attachment WHERE parentId IN ('" + "','".join(parentIds) + "')"
    for rec in session.selectRecords(extractSOQL):
        myDir = os.path.join(outputDir, rec.parentId)
        if not os.path.exists(myDir):
            os.makedirs(myDir)
         
        fh = file(os.path.join(myDir, rec.name), 'wb')
        fh.write( base64.b64decode(rec.body))
        fh.close()
        print rec.name

 
session = SQLForce.Session("sandbox")

parentIds = []
for rec in session.selectRecords(attachmentParentSOQL ):
    parentIds.append( rec.id )
    if len(parentIds) > 200 :
        extractAttachments( session, parentIds, outputDir )
        parentIds = []

if len(parentIds )>0:
    extractAttachments( session, parentIds, outputDir )