gokubi.com

I can’t stop giggling. My first 25-line Apex coding project will replace a 400+ line S-Control. Seriously, it’s blowing my mind a bit.

Here’s the code:

trigger HouseholdCheck on Contact bulk (before insert) {
  for (Contact c : Trigger.new) {
    if (c.ONEN_Household__c == NULL) {
      String RecognitionName;
      RecognitionName = c.firstname + ' ' + c.lastname;
      ONEN_Household__c hh = new ONEN_Household__c (
        Name=RecognitionName + ' Household',
        Recognition_Name__c=RecognitionName,
        Recognition_Name_Short__c=c.firstname,
        MailingStreet__c=c.MailingStreet,
        MailingCity__c=c.MailingCity,
        MailingState__c=c.MailingState,
        MailingPostalCode__c=c.MailingPostalCode,
        MailingCountry__c=c.MailingCountry
      );
      insert hh;
      c.ONEN_Household__c = hh.id;
     }
     if (c.AccountId == NULL) {
       Account[] account = [select id from account where Name = 'Individual'];
       c.AccountId = account[0].Id;
     }
  }
}

I won’t paste in the 400 line HTML form and code that it’s replacing…

All the new code does is create a Household for a Contact when you’re creating a Contact. If you’ve selected a Household, it doesn’t create one. It also adds the Contact to the Individual account if you haven’t picked a different one.

Simple, huh?

But it’s been really hard to do in Salesforce.com before Apex. We had to build a custom Contact creation form that was seriously 400+ lines long.

Not only does it replace my custom data entry screen, it fixes all sorts of problems. We couldn’t use Quick Create because a Household wouldn’t be created when the Contact was–now it will. We couldn’t let people sync Outlook contacts for the same reason–now we can. When a Contact is created anywhere, anyway, by anyone, the trigger will fire, and they will have a Household.

That also makes the integration story better. Our Plone integration won’t have to care about the Individual Account. It won’t have to worry about Households. We’ll have an Apex trigger like this one that will take care of our crazy business rules behind the scenes.

I knew Apex was coming and that it would make this kind of thing possible. But actually learning enough of the language to write this code in under two hours was more than I could have hoped for.

Apex is revolutionary. These guys are definitely on to something.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 3:00 pm and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.