Over the course of the last couple of weeks, i have been focusing my community time on release v2.4 of the DLRS tool. Specifically focusing on some much requested features driven by the community in the the Chatter group.

So lets get stuck in…

Rollup Scheduler Improvements

The ability to run a full (or partial with criteria) recalculate of a rollup on a daily schedule has been in the tool for a few releases now. However up until now the only option was to run it at 2am everyday. It is now possible to change this with this new UI, its a bit raw and basic, but for now it should at least give some more flexibility.

Support for Merging Accounts, Contacts and Leads

The platform has some special handling for merging Accounts, Contacts and Leads. Especially when it comes to when Apex Triggers are invoked. Basically if your parent object is one of these objects, prior versions of the tool had no awareness of this operation, so rollups would not recalculate. If you are using Realtime or Schedule calculation modes on your rollups. Since the platform does not fire Apex Triggers for child records reparented as a result of a merge.

With this release there are two things you can do to fix this. First when you click the Manage Child Trigger button, you get a new checkbox option to control deployment of an additional Apex Trigger on the parent object. If your upgrading you will need to click Remove then Deploy again, to see this.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you don’t feel merge operations are an issue for your use cases you can deselect this option and cut down on the number of triggers deployed. Also if it is only the rollup child object that supports merging, there is no need to deploy any additional triggers and the tool does not show the above checkbox option.

Secondly you need to setup the RollupJob as an Apex Scheduled job (under Setup > Apex Classes), even if you don’t have any Schedule Mode rollups. This is due to the fact that due to a platform restriction, the tool cannot recalculate rollups realtime during a merge operation. So it can only record that they need to be recalculated. It does this via the tools scheduled mode infrastructure, by automatically adding records to the Lookup Rollup Summary Schedule Items object. Note that you don’t need to change your rollups from Realtime to Scheduled mode for this to work, only schedule the job.

Support for Archived / Deleted Records via the All Rows Setting

Salesforce archives Tasks and Events after a while. If you have rollups over these child objects you can enable the Aggregate All Rows checkbox. This will ensure your rollups remain accurate even if some records have been archived. Note this also will apply to records in the recycle bin. For upgrades (if your not using the Manage Lookup Rollup Summaries tab), you will need to add this field to your layout to see it.

Row Limit for Concatenate and Last Rollup Operations

If your using the Last or Concatenate operations, you can define a limit as to how many child records are actually considered when calculating the rollup. This is useful if your using Concatenate into a fix length field for example. When upgrading you need to add the new Row Limit field to your layout if your not using the swanky new Manage Lookup Rollup Summaries tab.

Improved House Keeping for Scheduled Mode

If your are using rollups with their Calculation Mode set to Scheduled. The tool records parent rollup records to be later recalculated by the RollupJob Apex Scheduled job. In past releases if through merge or other operation the parent record was deleted before the next scheduled run. Then records would sit in limbo in the Lookup Rollup Summary Schedule Items object, being processed and erroring over and over. These will now be cleared out and there is no upgrade actions you need to take for this.

Summary

Thanks for everyones support for this tool, i hope these changes help you go further with clicks not code! Though as reminder please keep in mind the best practices and restrictions listed in the README. If you have any questions you can either post comments on this blog or use the Chatter Group. The Chatter Group is a great place to get your query seen by a broader group of people who are also diligently supporting the tool as well!

You can find releases of the tool here.