Hi,

 

When should one use variables and when should properties be used? Does one have a technical advantage over other?

 

Thanks

 

Rucha

 

 

Hi,

I have always believed that using DeveloperName is the best way to get Id of a RecordType. There is a small risk though that if an someone changes the DeveloperName the code may break. But usually only admins have access to change the DeveloperName and they are aware of the impacts. 

But one of my colleagues had a different philosophy that its better to use Ids instead of DeveloperName as it does not have the risk that someone might change it. Its convincing because even if the ids change between sandboxes and production, its only a one time change that needs to be done. But after that there is no risk that someone might change the ID and the code breaks.

Is there any advantage of using DeveloperName over actual Ids?

Posting this in order to help others who, months from now, might Google "OP_WITH_INVALID_USER_TYPE_EXCEPTION" and find this explanation.

 

We wrote an Apex trigger on the User object, to insert a custom object record anytime a user updates their Chatter status.  This was done to fulfill a client's requirement to audit all Chatter activity.

 

The trigger worked fine, until one day the client signed up some Chatter Free users.  When such a user tried to update their status, they got a pop-up with an OP_WITH_INVALID_USER_TYPE_EXCEPTION error.

 

We scratched our collective heads for awhile.  After all, Apex triggers run in "system mode," right?  That is supposed to mean that "object and field-level permissions of the current user are ignored."  And yet this trigger seemed like it was running in "user mode," enforcing restrictions based on who the current user was.

 

The root cause turned out to be that a Chatter Free user cannot be the owner of a custom object record, and SFDC by default sets the current user as a new record's first owner.  We discovered this when we realized, via experiment, that Apex triggers fired as the result of actions by Chatter Free users could definitely update an existing record, but were having problems creating records.

 

So the simple solution was to explicitly set the owner of the new record to some fully-licensed user prior to inserting it.