Stupid Salesforce Tricks

We recently had a requirement in Salesforce that was a little unique. An ongoing automated process would update the associated Contact to a record, however they didn’t want the automated process to do the update if the field had been updated by a human. Makes sense – if someone takes the time to make a manual association of a Contact to a record, then it’s probably better information than the automatic matching algorithm. As far as I can tell it’s impossible at runtime to know if the edit is due to a UI edit or is coming from code, so that’s out. Here’s how we made it happen. The idea is to have a “last updated by code” checkbox that will be set by a workflow. But in order for it to know if it’s been updated by code, you need a 2nd checkbox that is only updated in Apex. First, make two checkboxes on your record: Contact_Change_Trailing_Lock__c Contact_Last_Changed_By_Code__c Set the latter to true by default when a new record is crea...

It’s great how everything in CRM uses the XRM object model – it’s so easy to link entities. But sometimes it can be annoying. Like, what if I want to e-mail a Quote to a customer, or to an internal customer service person who may not be a CRM user? I can’t just drop the line items into an workflow email since it’s a 1:N. I created a custom workflow activity that does just this. It takes a sales entity’s line items (Opportunity Product, Quote Detail, Order Detail, or Invoice Detail) and assembles it into a string that you can drop into an email. It’s configurable on how it handles bundles and with currency symbols. Check it out on Codeplex !