Salesforce Ninja: An Elite Blog about Salesforce.com

This post is very old but it is long overdue. Have you seen the Ghost records in Salesforce? Whenever there is an auto-number field on an Object, it suddenly seems to have gaps in between? For e.g., if you have a auto-number set at 00001 and the next record it creates is 00004. These gaps are sometimes attributed to people who create records and delete. Auto-number fields Lets talk a bit about auto-number. Apart from the part that they are cool, they are also very stubborn. An auto-number field resets only once in its lifetime and never turns back. When an auto-number is incremented it does not go back, even if the record is deleted. So when you delete a record that has auto-number field on it, it will not decrement it by 1 but instead create the gap. Ghost records The real crux of the issue lies when developers write unit classes. Developers always create dummy records for testing. The test execution runs in a separate context than the main Salesforce. These records are not s...

I got an Email from a new administrator who is learning Salesforce. He asked about the difference between a workflow rule and an approval process. This article is for all those who have just started Salesforce, it does not cover how to create workflow rule and approval process but enlists the difference between the two. For information on how to create one, you can visit this article  on Success.Salesforce.com/ Help and training. The entire process of workflows and approval can be illustrated in the infographics below. Further reading: Creating Workflow Rules Examples of Workflow Rules Administrator tip sheet: Workflow: Automating The Process Choosing an Approval Process Wizard Approval Process Terminology Managing Approval Processes Examples of Approval Processes Questions, comments and suggestion go down in comments below.