Salesforce Lookup Object Relationships - salesforce

I have a number of objects that contains references to other objects in Salesforce. An example is that a Shipping is the parent object related to ShippingItem by the shippingId. In order to save ShippingItems I need to get the ShippingId of the Shipping object. Also, the ShippingItems are related to ShippingMethod object which contains the shipping methods, UPS, FEDEX etc. This is a picklist type that allows users to pick the shipping method. In order to create/save the ShippingItem. I need to obtain all the related fields, i.e. ShippingMethod i.e UPS, ShippingId to which it is related and other similar information. How can I obtain these fields in order to save the ShippingItems? When I inspect the Objects, I am unable to determine the fields to query in order to obtain the related information.
Please help

If I understood this correctly, ShippingItem has a lookup to Shipping and a lookup to ShippingMethod. Are you providing a UI where people create ShippingItems? If yes then ShippingID and ShippingMethodID should be populated on the shipping record when you get the record back in controller.
If your question is how to provide a list of ShippingMethod records on the UI for users to select, you can query the object records separately and create a picklist for the user to choose.
Adding a little more information or code snippet will help you get better answers.

Related

NoSql - entity holds an owner ID field vs owner holds list of child ID's

I am currently exploring MongoDB.
I built a notes web app and for now the DB has 2 collections: notes and users.
The user can create, read and update his notes.
I want to create a page called /my-notes that will display all the notes that belong to the connected user.
My question is:
Should the notes model has an ownerId field or the opposite - the user model will have a field of noteIds of type list.
Points I found relevant for the decision making:
noteIds approach:
There is no need to query the notes that hold the desired ownerId (say we have a lot of notes then we will need indexes and search accross the whole notes collection). We just need to find the user by user ID and then get all the notes by their IDs.
In this case there are 2 calls to DB.
The data is ordered by the order of insertion to the notesIds field in the document.
ownerId approach:
We do need to find the notes by their ownerId field across the notes collection which might be more computer "intensive".
We can paginate / sort the data as we want - more control over the data.
Are there any more points you can think of?
As I can conclude this is a question of whether you want less computer intensive DB calls vs more control over the data.
What are the "best practices"?
Thanks,
A similar use case is explained in the documentation. If there is no limit on number of notes a user can have, it might be better to store a userId reference field in notes document.
As you've figured out already, pagination would be easier in the second approach. Also when updating notes, you can simply updateOne({ _id: "note_id", userId: 1 }) instead of checking user's document if the note actually belong to the user.

Mass update of records

I have a custom object called Sales Target
I have 2 lookup fields for contact(Contact__c) and owner(OwnerId) in that object.
I have about 100 records where I need to change the Owner field to Contact field.
Any clues.
Contact records cannot be Owners of other records. Owners must be Users or Queues. You will not be able to make this change as written.
If your Contacts represent community users, you'll need to pull out those users' Ids instead.
Once you have User Ids in hand, you can make the change using any one of the many available data loaders for Salesforce, such as the Data Loader or the Data Import Wizard. You'd perform an Update operation in the data loader and would need to supply the Id of the record to update and the desired OwnerId value on each row.

Grab value from unrelated object where two fields match

I have two objects - "Account" and "Appointment". I'm trying to pull the value of the field "Status" from the "Appointment" object where "Account.Initial_Date" matches "Appointment.Date_Time". I initially tried making a new field in the "Account" object to return a text field and see if maybe it would return the first value:
Appointment__c.Status__c
Which results in the error:
"Field Appointment__c does not exist. Check spelling."
I was told that it's too difficult to link from "Appointment" to "Account" because there can be multiple appointments per account, which is why I'm trying to link based on the date fields. My next attempt was using VLOOKUP, but I read that this only works between custom objects, and I think I'm working with standard objects here... what kind of solution should I be looking for?
Adding the tag apex here in case this can only be achieved via a script of some sort - if that's the case, I'll make attempt via that.
I was told that it's too difficult to link from "Appointment" to "Account" because there can be multiple appointments per account
This is incorrect. That relationship appears to be exactly the same as that between Contact and Account - one Contact, many Accounts. It's a very common relationship pattern in Salesforce.
If an Appointment is logically related to an Account, it should have a relationship field referencing the Account object to which it is related.
However, having a one-to-many relationship does not mean you can trivially represent specific data points from the many side to the one side. The native tool to do so is the Roll-Up Summary Field, but it does not apply to your use case.
There's really three ways to implement your objective, which is essentially implementing a variant of a roll-up summary. VLOOKUP(), which works only in Validation Rules, does not apply here.
Write two Apex triggers (one on Account and one on Appointment) to react to all changes that would influence what value should appear in the Account__c.Status__c field.
Write equivalent Process and Flow declarative automation, which cannot get 100% of the way there because Process Builder and Flow cannot react to delete events.
Use the free and open source Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries application to define a roll-up summary. DLRS can populate a field from the child object (Appointment) to the parent (Account) based on a sorting by another field (Date_Time__c).

Create multiselect lookup in salesforce using apex

I want to create a multi-select Contact Lookup.
What i want :
When user clicks on a lookup then he should be able to select multiple contacts from that.
What i have done:
I have created an object and a field inside that object using both
"Lookup" and
"MasterDetail Relationship" and
"Junction Object"
When i try to use this Field for any input text/Field then it always provides an option to select only one value from lookup but i want to have an option to select multiple.
Even in the Junction object i have created 2 master-detail relationships still lookup allows only one value to be selected.Moreover it makes the field mandatory which i don't want.
Links that i followed:
http://success.salesforce.com/questionDetail?qId=a1X30000000Hl5dEAC
https://ap1.salesforce.com/help/doc/user_ed.jsp?loc=help&section=help&hash=topic-title&target=relationships_manytomany.htm
Can anybody suggest me how to do this.
Its same as we use Email CC/BCC under Send Email option for any Lead.
Even you use a junction object a lookup is just that, it references (looks up to) one other record: when you create a record on the junction object you still have to set each lookup individually and you're still creating only one record.
Master Detail relationships are essentially lookups on steroids, one object becomes the child of the other and will be deleted if the parent object is deleted, they're not going to provide an interface to lookup to many records at once.
If you're not a developer then your best bet is to either just create on junction object record at a time, or look into using dataloader. You could prepare your data in Excel or similar and then upload all the records into Salesforce in one go.
If you are a developer, or have developers at your disposal, then what we've done in the past is create a Visualforce page to do the job. So if, for example, you wanted to link a bunch of contacts up to an Account, we'd have a single account lookup field on the page, then some search fields relating to fields on the contact. Using a SOQL query you can then find all contacts matching the search parameters and display them in a list, where you may want to provide checkboxes to allow the user to select the contacts they want. Then it's just a case of looping through the selected contacts, setting their Account field to be the chosen account.
There are areas in Salesforce (such as the send Email functionality you mentioned) where it's clear to see that bespoke work has been done to fulfil a specific task — another instance of what you want is in the area where you can manage campaign members. This is the model I've copied in the past when implementing a Visualforce page as described.
Good luck!
For adding multiple junction objects at one time, the only solution we have found is a custom Visualforce page, as described by LaceySnr.
For a slightly different problem, where we need to assign many of object B to object A, We have trained our users to do this with a view on object B. We are assigning Billing Accounts (B) to Payment Offices (A). The view on Billing Account has check boxes on the left side. The user checks the Billing Accounts to be assigned, then double-clicks on the Payment Office field on any of the checked rows. A pop-up asks if you want to update only the single row or all checked rows. By selecting 'all checked rows', the update is done to all of them.
The view is created by the user, who enters the selection criteria (name, address, state, etc.). All user-created views are visible only to them.

Order data using values stored in another table

I've been using cakephp for a while, but have not learned all the ins and outs yet so I may be missing something simple. Or the problem may lie with my database structure. Either way, if anyone has any idea of what I'm doing wrong, please share.
Is there a way to order the data returned by cakephp's find using values stored in another table?
I am creating custom form fields on a per category basis, so when I choose a particular category to post in, custom fields will be added to my form. I have 3 tables: Posts, Fields, and Answers. The Posts table stores the basic static information for the post, such as id, category_id, title, and description. The Fields table stores the custom field data, such as category_id, field_label, field size, etc. The Answers table stores the values that are entered for particular fields, such as post_id, field_id, value.
I am trying to display the posts for a particular category, and create html table headers on the fly, using select fields, set by a column toggle in the fields table, and also select the answers associated with that particular field and post.
I am able to select all the data I want, and paginate everything just fine, but what I can't seem to figure out is how to order the data using one of the dynamic column values. For example, if I have year, make, and model as 3 custom fields, I would like to click the year column to sort my results by the year values, and if I click the make column, I would like to sort my results by the make values, etc.
I know how to order the results by a particular field inside the posts table, such as id or title, but is it possible to order using the custom fields? Am I setting up the database and/or something else wrong, and if not is there are particular cakephp method or sql command that I need to use in order to sort by the custom fields? I'm not really well versed in complex sql commands.
Thanks.
I'd suggest you pass the field name and sort direction in the URL (GET param). So when you have your table header link, form it so that it links to a URL as so:
http://somesite.com/pages/index/sort:customfield1/dir:asc
Then when you're grabbing the data from the db in your find() query, include the named parameters as the order parameter that can be sent to find.
You'll need to determine a default sorting column and direction. Maybe have that be selectable with a boolean field in the schema -- if there are no parameters sent to the action above, pull the field from your other table that has default set to true in the record.
To clarify: when a user visits a given action, first you'll pull the custom fields from the other table. Then using those fields (either the default as mentioned above, or the named params passed in the URL) form the query for the actual data, using the order parameter.

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