Building My Dev Cred

…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:

Let’s See the Code!

Here’s a little video of my code in action. (All the data is sample data).

Apex Test Class

Apex Trigger Handler

Task Trigger

Published by

JessieRymph

Jessie joined Salesforce.org in 2018 to give introductory webinars to nonprofit customers. She now is a Senior Solution Developer supporting nonprofits and education customers at Salesforce. All opinions expressed on this blog are her own or those of the contributors. She's spent 17 years more or less in CRMs and databases, but didn't meet Salesforce until 2011. Jessie co-led the Seattle Salesforce Nonprofit User Group in 2015-2016. She wrote a sh*tty first draft of a novel and hopes to turn it into a screenplay!

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