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E.J. Wilburn

Allow adding new master-detail relationships to existing managed objects.

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Currently you cannot add a new master-detail relationship to an object that has already been released as part of a managed package. This prevents developers from expanding on current functionality, requiring them to abandon the old object and create a new object if the master-detail relationship is needed.

In our case, we wanted to take advantage of the multiple master-detail relationship functionality that was added in a previous release to replace our trigger code that emulated multiple masters on a custom object, but cannot due to this limitation.

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Latest Comment from Salesforce

Andrew Smith - 6 years ago

We currently don't have any plans to offer this feature. As a work around, you can create a new object for the detail and migrate the data either as part of an install script or through a post install operation in your app.

The problem with allowing this is that existing objects lose their OwnerId field and also their [ObjectName]Share table in the API. If a customer has built integrations or customized the app to use these fields/objects then the package upgrade will fail. In addition, certain customizations are not possible on detail objects that are allowed on standalone (lookup) objects. This again complicates the upgrade.

We'll continue to re-evaluate this feature as new capabilities are added to the platform that might permit us to allow this.

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Comments ( 28 )

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Venkata Kunisetty - 5 months ago

While we understand the limitation here, it is good to have this ability especially when you are building a package and you realized the need to add a master-detail relationship a little after you built your first version of the package. In our case, we have decided to use the work around suggested by the Product team, creating a new child object.

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Jnanendra Pande - 10 months ago

Much needed feature.
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Andrea Parimbelli - 1 year ago

It will be helpful! Much needed feature
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Nagaraja Godmala - 1 year ago

This feature will allow us to not worry about the visibility of the child object.
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Steve Fouracre - 1 year ago

Hi Andy Smith
I understand your workaround but you are then left with an additional object in your package that you dont want
Also I understand that the app provider must be careful because this could seriously affect existing customers, so probably this should be a feature on request to Salesforce.
However like myself I released a package but then realised a small gap in the design which when trying to address Im not allowed to

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Manfred Aigner - 3 years ago

Similar is a need to change from master/detail to lookup. Is this possible with managed packaged?
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Jay Srinivasan - 3 years ago

It certainly helps to rollout evolving apps changes to our customer
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Niklas Funk - 3 years ago

Much needed to facilitate sharing between related objects and to prevent an extensive usage of avoid Sharing Rules.
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Elena Sierra - 4 years ago

Why not allow the relationship lookup field to be edited to become a master detailed one? What would prevent that from happening? Once that has occurred, allow the custom managed object to be able to allow new fields that have master lookup as their type of field?

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Elena Sierra - 4 years ago

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Aleem Mohammed - 5 years ago

Much needed feature. Need this be enabled sooner
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FlightWare Support - 5 years ago

This would be really helpful. Or alternatively the ability to have Roll Up Summary fields on related objects that are not Master-Detail.
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Brett Talbot (IHT) - 5 years ago

Understood but still would be incredibly useful :)
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Jilayne Petruzzi - 6 years ago

I would love this feature.
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Dmitry Rivlin - 6 years ago

If salesforce can't implement this feature, may be salesforce can implement delete action for object in managed package ?
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