exporting field help text and description in bulk

TIL that you can create custom report type on entity definition + field definition to report on your fields!

h/t : https://www.asagarwal.com/how-to-report-on-objects-and-fields-defined-in-salesforce/ and Anna Loughnan

However I could not include field help text, though it is listed in the tooling api docs for fielddefinition

then i tried a custom report type on entity definition with entity particle, and added field definition via lookup

this worked in theory - i could include description and inline help text.

but when i ran the report, field description remained blank. other folks said the report type worked for them, so i should test more as the report types would be really simple to use. so try that first.

instead I ran a soql query to test it out, and this works

select entitydefinition.label, inlinehelptext,fielddefinition.description,fielddefinition.label from entityparticle where entitydefinition.label = 'Opportunity'

and you can also include the defaultValue for the field by adding the DefaultValueFormula field

select entitydefinition.label,inlinehelptext,fielddefinition.description,fielddefinition.label,DefaultValueFormula from entityparticle where entitydefinition.label = 'Opportunity'

there are a bunch more options, have not explored them all. see the docs and figure out what is useful for your use case!

Note - the soql query option requires filtering by object. You cannot just remove the filter, so you cant get this data for all objects.

Reports let you get the data for all objects, but you cannot get help text and description in a single report.

Custom report type of entity definition with field definition can include object description and field description, but not help text.

CRT of entity definition with entity particle can include object description, and field help text, but not field description. You can add field definition via lookup to the CRT, but field description remains blank regardless…

so you must use two reports, one to get description and one to get help text, and join them (durable ID works for a key, there are other options also)

Also tried doing this in power query but runs into the same query issue, can only get the entity definition table.