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16,540 Points voting closed

Delivered in Summer 13

Soorya Sharma

Make Owner Look up fields available for formulas

Customization & App Building

It is great to have the cross object look up feature in the formulas and validaiton rules. But the look up fields are not avaiable for Owner, even thoough lookup fields are available for similar "user" fields like created by/ modified by.

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Latest Comment from Salesforce

Shannon Hale - 8 years ago

All right! Now that the Summer '13 release notes are out, I think I can safely say this is coming soon to an org near you. And we'll support owner as users, queues and even calendars.

As I mentioned before, we weren't able to get in support for Visualforce formula syntax. But it will show up pretty much everywhere else you create formulas: formula fields, validation rules, workflow rules, field update actions, approval processes, etc. And we aren't supporting other polymorphic fields (like Who or What on Activities) yet, just Owner. We'll look at those gaps in future releases.

Because of the polymorphic nature of the Owner field, and because it's polymorphic on some objects and not others, the syntax is a little trickier than normal. So be sure to refer to the documentation on this one.

There are several other core platform features coming in the Summer '13 release in addition to this one -- including another long-awaited formula field enhancement. Check out the release notes for more details!

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Comments ( 304 )

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Johan Yu - 7 years ago

Love this one!
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Stacey Chale - 7 years ago

This is my favorite Summer 13 feature! :-)
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Donna Messineo - 7 years ago

Required for sending email reminder to outside teams when an opportunity is transferred and hasn't been touched for X amount of time.
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Jason Atwood - 8 years ago

Can't wait to have this in Summer 13.
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Daniel Bromley - 8 years ago

Does this mean that Owner can also be used for merge fields?
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Kevin Chatterton - 8 years ago

This would be a great feature. Can't wait to see it in the next release.
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Brad Sparrow - 8 years ago

Yes!
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Shannon Hale - 8 years ago

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Jana Paila - 8 years ago

We have come across several scenarios within the organization where we need this.
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Brandon Ward - 8 years ago

Absolutely necessary. One example of a limitation with standard object reporting that I've run into is Leads - which company has the most unread leads? Well, we can't answer that question if we only have access to the Owner value but no lookup fields off of the owner ID. This is a "must have" and a true common sense feature that should be addressed ASAP - or help us understand the workaround that DOESN'T involve triggers, multiple custom fields & workflow, etc...Please, please, please!!!

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Carlos Tavares - 8 years ago

Quite useful.
-ct-
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James Foxon - 8 years ago

This would be really great if it is implemented
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Anthea Bakas - 8 years ago

Agree - We need to be able to reference the Owner field in a workflow rule to populate a text field with the value. It's a real problem for us at the moment.
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Sir Rodney MacKenzie - 8 years ago

Shannon, that sounds great. So it's possible in Summer 13 we'll see the following new field in the formula builder for an Account?
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Scott Molinari - 8 years ago

@JRRF - That is a neat little trick. I'll have to remember it.

However, the issue here is getting data from the owner record in general in forumulas. The data or access to it in formula editors is simply missing and the only way to get it is to make a second master-detail field in the object you are working with and create a trigger to automatically fill it with the userid of the owner. You end up having to duplicate this for every object (including SF standard ones) to get to that user/ owner data. It is a proverbial PITA, considering every other master-detail field shows up as a possible field insert in a formula editor.

What I did is add a master-detail look-up field in the objects we needed to get owner data on and gave it a suffix of "(hidden)" and added this trigger (which is for the Opportunity object).

trigger opportunityownerCopy on Opportunity (before Insert, before Update) {

    // handle arbitrary number of opps
    for(Opportunity o : Trigger.New){

        // check that owner is a user (not a queue)
        if( ((String)o.OwnerId).substring(0,3) == '005' ){
            o.Opportunity_Owner_hidden__c = o.OwnerId;
        }
        else{
            // in case of Queue we clear out our copy field
            o.Opportunity_Owner_hidden__c = null;
        }
    }

}

It is not a hard workaround, but it is one and I am really glad SF is making the change. 

Scott