Comments on: Summer ‘07 Features

By: John Hart

John Hart — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 18:47:25 +0000

Aiden,

I haven’t yet tried the roll-up fields in a pre-release build.

Have you seen any official documentation about the “up to 30 minute” delay in calculating roll-up values? The Summer 07 release notes don’t mention this.

I was hoping to use some of these values within triggers, but if there’s a delay then that won’t be workable & I’ll have to maintain them myself. Any pointers to official docs which state this?

thanks,
john

By: David Claiborne

David Claiborne — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 17:57:22 +0000

I also tried the roll-up summary in the pre-release. I was looking for something that would roll up child accounts into a parent account.

Nope, it’s not there.

You could do it with Apex, but it could get very contentious when there are a lot of accounts and a lot of children.

By: Aiden

Aiden — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 14:20:15 +0000

Hi,
I just logged into a Summer 07 pre-release of salesforce.com and immediately tried to test what “Roll-Up Summary” fields can and cannot do.

Here’s some information from the on-line help which shows the limitations of this new feature.

Create roll-up summary fields on:
Any custom object that is on the master side of a master-detail relationship.
Any standard object that is on the master side of a master-detail relationship with a custom object.
The object on which you create the field should be on the master side of a custom master-detail relationship.

(I can create a roll-up summary between Account and a custom table, but so far can’t create one between Account and Opportunities, Opportunity and Opportunity Line Items, or Opportunity LIne Item and Opportunity Line Item Schedules.)

For the maximum number of roll-up summary fields allowed in your organization, see App Setup Limits.

Roll-up summary fields cannot calculate the values of other roll-up summary fields.

Roll-up functions are Count, Sum, Min, Max

Roll-up summary fields can calculate the values of formula fields.

Calculating roll-up summary field values may take up to 30 minutes, depending on the number of records affected and other factors.
If your organization uses multiple currencies, the currency of the master record determines the currency of the roll-up summary field.

Roll-up summary fields do not support objects with advanced currency management. If advanced currency management is enabled in your organization, we recommend deleting any existing currency roll-up summary fields on opportunities to prevent the invalid roll-up summary icon from displaying.

Automatically derived fields such as current date or current user are not allowed in roll-up summary fields.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 03:34:37 +0000

Agreed - can’t wait for this to feature to be rolled out, along with any subsequent ideas that may be needed to finish it off…

By: Andres

Andres — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 05:55:51 +0000

I wonder too if cross object formulas will be available for custom objects.

If I build a Master-Detail relationship between an Opportunity and a Custom Object, will I be able to “roll up” financial values (for example) to the Opportunity?

We’ll see! Closer is better than not at all though. I suspect at minimum custom fields on Opportunity Lines will be available for “roll up” to the Opportunity. I know of a few clients that have spent thousands of dollars to “get there” for just this need in particular.

By: Scott Hemmeter

Scott Hemmeter — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:16:54 +0000

Steve, I agree. They are not delivering 100% of the need expressed in the Idea. This would only be formulas from parent objects looking down on their child objects. It would not allow you to include, for example, the Contact’s Mailing City on a Case (i.e. it would not allow joined fields).

By: Luke

Luke — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 14:38:50 +0000

Thanks for pointing that one out - I missed it in my 90-second review of the new features. I’ve spent the past 3 months coming up with various ways of doing just this in AJAX ; as is so often the case, I spend hours “preinventing” the wheel when I should just wait for Salesforce to roll out a solution!

(course I am still waiting for HTML formatting in Solutions that was promised in Spring…)

Luke “Always Thinkin” C.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 14:29:01 +0000

When they’re talking about this feature, they’re always saying “Parent - Child” and I think that’s important. Account is the parent of Opportunity, so I think you’d be able to sum Opportunity Amounts to the Account. But, Contact to Opportunity via the ContactRole object isn’t a Parent - Child relationship, so I suspect we won’t be able to do those kinds of rollups.

We’ll see when the release comes…