Hi guys

Don't know if I missed something or if there are some reasons for that.

I was trying to create a before update trigger for contact but I was encountering some problems, and it turned out it's because the Contact.Name requires NULL.

I have a contact whose last name is "LastName" and whose first name is "FirstName".  I assume underneath, the Name attribute of this contact is set to "FirstName LastName".

The trigger code is like this:

trigger testcontact on Contact (before update) 
{
  for (Contact c : Trigger.old)
    system.debug('old ' + c.name + ' ' + c.firstname + ' ' + c.lastname) ;

  for (Contact c : Trigger.new)
    system.debug('new ' + c.name + ' ' + c.firstname + ' ' + c.lastname) ;
}

When I opened up this Contact, and without editing anything, just hit Save, this is what's in my debug log:

[25]DEBUG|old null FirstName LastName

[28]DEBUG|new null FirstName LastName 

Anyone has any idea why Contact.Name returns null and not the actual name of the contact?  I understand this is a formula field, but when I do a soql like this:

SELECT Name FROM Contact WHERE LastName = 'LastName'

it does return me 'FirstName LastName'.

So I don't know why I can't access this inside a trigger.

Thanks