Thank you for moving away from OAuth Device Flow

[FeldhackerChrisPFG]

Hi! I just wanted to drop a note to say the security improvements in the v64 release are much appreciated!
It would be great to see Salesforce provide the ability to disable OAuth Device Flow entirely, and we're eager for improvements to External Client Apps to continue to make working with sandboxes easier. Keep up the good work!

[ashitsalesforce]

Hi @FeldhackerChrisPFG , thanks for your feedback. A clarifying question: in what way v64.0.2 can be improved to enable ECA in Sandboxes? In other words, what challenges you are encountering when setting up ECA in Sandboxes that you aren't encountering when doing so in Production?

[FeldhackerChrisPFG]

Hi @ashitsalesforce, I don't think there's any improvements Data Loader itself can really make with regards to ECA, rather improvements are needed on the Salesforce side. The biggest obstacle today is that when a sandbox is created/refreshed local ECAs are not copied down unlike legacy Connected Apps. (Link)

Note Local external client apps aren’t copied to a new sandbox when you clone or refresh a sandbox. Only packaged external client apps are copied to the sandbox.

So work is done to get the ECA for Data Loader all setup in Production, but then the work has to be repeated for every sandbox that you want to connect to with Data Loader, including re-setting up granting user access. The nice thing about the legacy managed Connected Apps "Dataloader Bulk" and "Dataloader Partner" is that they just automatically existed in all orgs automatically, production and sandboxes alike.

A sandbox should mimic production, so hopefully we'll see some improvements from Salesforce with ECA in future releases.