…And building a trigger that creates a new task when an email was sent!
In 2018, I’m focusing on building my “dev cred,” as Leah McGowen-Hare put it at Forcelandia a few years ago.
Next week is the final week of my RAD Women coding course and I am thrilled with how far I have come.
I am also building more connections in the Salesforce digital communities of Trailblazer, Power of Us Hub and Twitter.
So I was checking out the unanswered questions on the Trailblazer Community to see if I could help out and I ran into this one:
Is it possible to use Process Builder or Workflow in auto creating a task after an email is sent related to a record? The email (with a specific Subject filter) will be sent from (A) within Salesforce or (B) Gmail/Outlook but will be recorded in the Activity History. I tried to create a WR but it didn’t run after I sent an email.
The answer to that is ‘No.’ The end.
Just kidding.
Another user and I asked a few more questions to clarify. We are not talking about sending an email through process builder and creating a task to log that email. We are talking about clicking the “Send an Email” button on a contact, which stores as an activity. Can a follow-up task be automatically created?
I realized I could probably create a trigger for this. Over the past year or two, I have thought this a lot: I think I know enough to cobble some code together and make something work, but an hour or so later, I would give up in frustration. But not today!
I didn’t cobble any code together – I wrote my own successful Apex Trigger and Trigger Handler class from scratch!*
The simply delightful trigger waits for a new task with the subject starting with “Email:” (this is what happens when you send an email through Salesforce) attached to a contact. It then creates a high priority follow-up task with the date set one month from today! I DID IT! SO SATISFYING!
I told my friend @tgeorgelearned about my success. After giving me a high five, he reminded me to write the test class, and then reminded me that I know how to write Test Classes. And I did.
Huge thanks to the women in my RAD Women code group (#crazytownbananapants) and my wonderful coaches, Laura Meerkatz and Beth Briesnes! Also many thanks to @tgeorgelearned for teaching me to fish.
Resources:
- Kieren Jameson’s Tasty Trigger Treat – *I basically reused everything here, but I understood all of it, I didn’t just copy and paste it. Break through!
- SFDC99’s One Trigger Per Object Rule
Let’s See the Code!
Here’s a little video of my code in action. (All the data is sample data).
