Salesforce Validation Rules — Things you may not know or forgot

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What are validation rules?

While creating any application, one of the most crucial building block is clean and good data. We do get ability to define required fields on field and page layout level, but there can be complex scenarios where the business rule needs multiple fields to ascertain data quality.

Salesforce provides a very helpful feature called “Validation rule” to ensure administrators/ developers can create custom validation rules on Salesforce objects. These validation rules help ensure that any record being created or updated qualifies to defined business rules. If not, then developers/ administrators can display required error message.

Validation rule constitutes of:-

• Formula — formula to evaluate business rule. If formula evaluates to TRUE, validation error is thrown, else it’s considered as validation success
• Error message — error message to be displayed on validation failure
• Location — Enables admin/ developer to define location to display validation error. In standard page layouts, it’ll allow user to show error either at page top or beneath the selected field

Validation rules are invoked anytime a record is created/ updated via any process I.e. manually from UI, API etc.

When to use validation rules?

Validation rules are most useful to implement required business rules without using any code. All validation rules are configurable and can be modified/ disabled by admin/ developers whenever needed.

There can be many scenarios where business rules are to be defined, so that user gets appropriate data validation error messages. For example

• A user cannot create a contact without email address where the contact’s preferred contact method is Email
• A user cannot assign case back to Queue

To know more about how to create validation rules refer help articles:

Define Validation Rules

Examples of Validation Rules

When validation rules may not be applicable?

However, there can be scenarios wherein the business rule needs multiple records or child records to assess data validation. In such scenario, Apex triggers will be best avenue to implement business rules.

Scenarios where Validation rules are skipped

1. If validation rules exist for activities and you create an activity during lead conversion, the lead converts but a task isn’t created
2. Campaign hierarchies ignore validation rules
3. If records are mass assigned via Mass Transfer tool, Change owner and Accept buttons
4. During lead conversion validation rules are skipped if validation and triggers for lead conversion are not enabled
5. When changing ownership on Accounts, Opportunity Validation Rules are also ignored when selecting to transfer Closed Opportunities and Opportunities not owned by the existing Account Owner
6. If workflow rules and process scheduled actions modify the record, validation rules are skipped

Considerations

1. Because updates to records based on workflow rules and also on process scheduled actions don’t trigger validation rules, workflow rules and some processes can invalidate previously valid fields
2. Salesforce runs validation rules before creating a record via web to lead or web to case, if the any rule fails, the record is not created
3. Validation rules apply to all fields of the record, irrespective of any page layout

For more details refer:-

https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=fields_validation_considerations.htm&type=0&language=en_US&release=204.17

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Article originally published on my blog: http://www.vermanshul.com/2016/12/quick-tips-somethings-about-validation.html