There has been some discussion about asking the salesforce.com team to include the CaseComment object in the “triggerable” list. After conferring with JP Seabury (ForceMonkey), we designed a Rube Goldberg-esque solution to the problem.
Business Use-Case
Whenever a user adds a comment to a case, add him/her to the Case Team.
The Plan
Here it is, in general terms:
- Workflow on
Case Commentsends email to Apex email service - Email service parses
CaseIdandUserIdand adds the User to the Case Team
Case Comment Workflow
Use existing workflow functionality to send an email whenever a comment is added to a case.
- Template Includes:
- Case Id
- User Id
The recipient is an Apex email service that we can code using the Email to Idea example by Rasmus Mencke.
For more information on setting up the InboundEmail object, check the Apex documentation.
Apex Class
The class needs to add the User to the Case Team, which requires a few fields:
MemberId– UserId (received from the email)ParentId– CaseId (received from the email)TeamRoleId– Could be hardcoded or found in a SOQL SELECT statement. A better practice would be to pass the name orIdin the email (coding it in the template), allowing the use of one Apex Class with multiple Case workflow email templates.- NOT
TeamTemplateMemberId– This is not a createable field. It is only available when Case Team members are added automatically in Salesforce CRM.
That’s it! The unique part of this is that we’re sending an email FROM Salesforce TO Salesforce.
Thinking outside the box – isn’t it more fun?
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Nice post. You are so outside the box that you no longer need it!
Late night hacks that start over Twitter, migrate over to a phone call and then end up as a “share what you know” blog post are my FAVORITE type of hacks! It’s great flying wingman with you, David!
The email service is an unnecessary extra step. As I explain here:
http://blogs.salesforce.com/support/2008/10/how-to-stop-peo.html
Workflow From Case Comments is a chaining workflow, which means it fires off the full set of workflow actions on Case. This includes Apex triggers. So all you really need to do is make a trigger on your case which adds the user to the case team when the Workflow From Case Comments touches the case.
Interesting approach. Yes, a workflow on Case Comment could make a change to the Case, but the Case (chained) trigger would not have access to the UserID of the running user. How would the triger fire (i.e. how would it know that the workflow had “touched” the Case?
It’s a good idea; could you please be more specific? The KISS principle is always appreciated here!
Indeed — you’d have to set your Workflow From Case Comments to store the user ID of the commenter into a custom field on the case, and have your Case trigger use that field. Admittedly, then, you’ll be eating a custom field.
The LastModifiedDate field of both the Case and CaseComment records are updated when a Case Comment is modified. However, when modifying a Case record, the LastModifiedDate of any associated CaseComment records are not modified. Consequently, you can compare the LastModifiedDate of the CaseComment records against the LastModifiedDate of the parent Case that generated the trigger. If the LastModifiedDate of the Case record is newer than that of the child CaseComment, changes to the Case record caused the trigger. Otherwise, changes to the CaseComment caused the trigger. I just implemented this today in our sandbox and it seems to work but I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at edge conditions and I could have missed something. This strategy requires no workflow rules and is very easy to implement.
That is an interesting approach, and I can certainly see uses for comparing the LastModifiedDate in other scenarios!
I think I see where you’re coming from: Because CaseComment will also execute any Case triggers, you are comparing those dates. So by editing the Case Comment, it will trigger on the Case. That’s great. How do you query the LMD of the CaseComment record if the trigger sits on the Case? I’m having trouble visualizing it; would you like to post your code or send it to me so I can post it with proper formatting? Feel free to use “Send a File” in the Contact Us section.
Thanks for the comment!
I dropped you the complete code that provides a CaseComment trigger. In response to your question, you can access the Case Comment (which actually caused the Case trigger) using the ParentId field in the CaseComment object. It is the Id of the Case record. The SOQL to get the LMD of the Case Comment is: “CaseComment aCaseComment = [SELECT LastModifiedDate FROM CaseComment WHERE ParentId = :C.Id ORDER BY LastModifiedDate DESC limit 1];”. Get the Case LMD using this: “Case aCase = [SELECT LastModifiedDate FROM Case WHERE Id = :C.Id];”. Then do the comparison: “if (aCaseComment.LastModifiedDate >= aCase.LastModifiedDate)”. Put your code to handle a CaseComment trigger inside that “if” statement. Be sure your code handles the potential exception where the Case has no Case Comments or your users won’t be able to make changes to any of their cases.