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My company hired an agency to create an MQL salesforce object. Its constructed from an Apex class with various triggers.

We no longer have a need for it, and as the standing saleforce admin, there is none at the company who knows Apex. I'm taking classes to learn it, but wanted to check in and see how I can deprecate the object from salesforce by archiving/deleting (or even just commenting out the code) to push the update to production.

Does anyone have insight into how to go about doing this? All of the courses I've taken are basic understanding of Apex and how to write small triggers, classes and queries. The agency who built the class left 0 documentation on its code.

Andreas Pappas
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1 Answers1

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You can't write code in production so whatever you'll try to do - will have to be done in sandbox, tested and then deployed.

There's a way to do a "destructive deployment" and really delete it but you'll need programming tools (VSCode, Eclipse IDE or Ant + Migration Tool). It's bit advanced topic, I'd suggest you hire a dev ;) or try to just comment them out.

In sandbox you can comment out the body (bodies?) of triggers and classes. You shouldn't kill whole file, leave some empty skeletons like

public with sharing class MqlGenerator{
/* kill everything
*/
}

trigger MqlTrigger on MQL__c (after insert){
/* kill everything
*/
}

Of course if there's trigger on Account and it does 10 things, only 2 of them relate to MQL then don't comment everything out ;) It'll be bit of trial and error for you, depends how clean the code is.

You will have to touch triggers, normal classes and likely unit tests too because if they did decent job - there will be tests that verify these triggers do something and now these tests will start to fail.

Add the files to changeset as you go (you do changesets, right? Doesn't sound like you deploy with Git+SFDX for example). From time to time run Apex Classes -> Compile all classes and run unit tests. Some manual testing wouldn't hurt too. If you are unsure what's left you can click on MQL's fields, there's "Where is this used?" button. Or even try clicking delete & repeating until it succeeds ;)

After you deploy this changeset...

If the MQL__c has no triggers (for example it is created in Account updates but itself doesn't have triggers), you might actually be able to delete the object. If there are related triggers, workflows etc SF will stop you. The only way to really delete it would be to run this destructive deploy. It's possible without installing anything, use the link I included and for example workbench would let you make a deployment. But it's bit "pro", if you're unsure start with commenting stuff out and maybe leave the empty skeleton until you're more comfortable. You can always hide the object's Tab, remove right to Read the object and it'll disappear from listviews, reports... it'll be an eyesore only for sysadmins.

If object has to stay around but the data storage is significant you could try truncating the object. If it gives you trouble - Data Loader, export all records (just IDs), then delete. Maybe even with hard delete option so you skip recycle bin.

eyescream
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