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EricLehnenEricLehnen 

Relating a custom object to Contacts and Accounts

Here is my situation:

 

I am trying to develop a report which identifies the all the contacts related to accounts using a specific product so I can add them to a campaign.

 

We have a custom object called "Products" which is a tab that lists all of the competitor Products in our industry. Our other custom object is called "District Product" and it is a related list in Accounts that shows all the Products that an account is using.

 

I contacted support and said that I am unable to create a report to add Contacts to a campaign using Report Type because "Products" are related to an Accounts, not Contacts (I tried relating them to Contacts, but they didn't populate for some reason). However, they reccomended that I am able to create custom forumla fields that will look up the the products that an account is uing and populate those fields under the related contacts.

 

So, if Account A is using Product B, I would like all the Contacts related to Account A to display Product B in a field (as support reccomended) or another way such as displaying the "District Product" custom field in Contacts and have them populated. To play it safe, I think I should go with the formula field approach.

 

What would they formula fields look like? Any help is much appreciated!

EricLehnenEricLehnen

Here is the response I recieved from Support:

 

The custom report that you would like to build at the moment will not be possible unless a joined report is created and the only issue is that we will not be able to add the contacts to the campaign from the joined report or be able to export it. In regards to setting up a custom report type, this will not be possible due to the relationships that the three objects you are looking to include share. The way that custom report types work is that the B object is related to the A object and if you add a C object, it will be related to the B object. We unfortunately cannot have a B and C object both related to the A object in the custom report type.

The issue here, as we saw, is with the object relationships of accounts, contacts and this custom objects district products. The way to pull this report would be if the district product is related to both the account and contact. The way that I was able to find that you would be able to do this would be through custom formula look up fields. My recommendation would be to create in the Product District custom object a formula look up for the account relationship field and the product relationship field. I believe it would be possible to have the district product automatically associate to both the account, contact and product through a cross object look up formula field. With the same information appearing within the account and the contact, you can then run the Contacts with District products report to obtain the date you are looking for.