Rollup Helper Saved My Bacon

If you fail the first time...fry,fry again! I welcome you to my Apex journey, now that I've been working on creating my first Salesforce Trigger for over a month now. I think that I am "this close" (pinches fingers & squints) to getting my SF Trigger to execute correctly.

My biggest challenge? Every video/example always starts with just the final code and not the basics. I would love for someone to go through each step of creating the Apex Class and defining what and why you did what you did. My new mission is to blog exactly that, so for any other visual learners out there (like me) you'll be able to follow along.

In the interim, Rollup Helper seriously SAVED MY BACON. And anyone that knows me well, knows that I love me some bacon!

My challenge was to roll up an object that was not correctly set up as a Master/Detail Object (because that would be too easy, right?) but was created as a lookup relationship. To simplify this, imagine you sent out a year end survey and asked your contacts to rank you. Each responded back and under each contact record in Salesforce you now have an associated score. You'd now like to roll up that ranking score to your Accounts to see which Industries you have the best reputation in. Unfortunately, Contacts are not Master-Detail to Accounts. WHAT? Yes, that's correct and very frustrating. So welcome, you're at a crossroad where all the workflows and validations can't help. You want this data updated in real time.

You. Need. A. Trigger.

A quick App install that can help buy you time to build your Trigger is Rollup Helper. Great App, 3 rollups included for FREE (Salesforce Admins everywhere are swooning!) Now there's a catch - you can only create 3, you can't schedule them and if you need more than 3, then you've got to pay. Still, a HUGE time saver and you can always execute the rollup as needed for reporting. Just remember to give yourself enough time for the rollup jobs to run. I had ~50,000 records and my job needed around 2 hours to process. No big deal if you've planned ahead. Their reps also reach out to you shortly after install which is great in case you run into any problems. I actually found that establishing my rollup jobs helped me think through how I needed to structure my data for my trigger (AND even displayed the field structure that I needed which is great for a newbie like me).

I'll be tackling my Step by StepApex instruction at the next Charlotte User Group meeting on Saturday, February 7th. Checkout the Eventbrite page to register if you would like to participate!