Confused about Salesforce logins, developer vs. normal account, linking, etc

Question

I'm a developer, and not in Sales.

I signed up for a free developer account, which has access to mock data:

• Username: my.name@company.com
• Email: my.name@company.com
• I'll call this the "dev account"

Later I wanted to access to our company's actual customers, just to look around. Our admin gave me a different, regular login (she said it complained when she tried to use my existing email). That account is:

• Username: othername@company.com
• Email: my.name@company.com
• I'll call this the "user account"

You'll notice the username is different, though the email comes to the same place.

I've been working with the dummy data that comes with the developer account. Now I'd like to access some of our real data via the REST API. It's not clear how I'd do that, and I don't want to blindly experiment and get into some type of weird state.

When I'm logged in as the "user account", and then access the developer website, it wants me to create another developer account. I'm not sure that's right. Also, the "Email" field would be the same as both my current "user account" and "developer account".

So how do I go from being a regular user to a developer against my company's actual data? Ideas I had:

• Somehow link my existing "dev account" with my "user account" ? Not sure if I'd do this, or if it's something our admin would need to do?
• Or maybe create a second developer account, having already been logged in as my "user account", and it will somehow magically associate them? It says "Select a unique username", but I already have 2 (old dev account, and new user account). I don't want to experiment and make things worse.
• Some other way to do this?
• Can I even create another developer account with the same email? Won't it complain?

I did do some google searches, but somehow I'm not hitting the right keywords. This seems like a basic thing that many folks would have to do at some point.

An aside: It's odd that it wants my zip code. Not sure if that's my home or work zip, and what if the office or my address changes? (actually likely) Most online services don't care about that...

Answer 1

You don't mention how you're accessing your data from the developer account, but somewhere you are authenticating (either via OAuth,or via a soap login call) simply change this to provide your user account credentials and you should be good to go. You don't need to have a matching account on the developer website to make API calls, or link your developer & user accounts.