Householding

The use of Householding of Contacts in Salesforce.com is very handy for some of the needs of nonprofits.

Housholding allows:

• the communication with a Household, rather than an individual
• the grouping of Contact related data up to the Household when desired

But there are some problems with the way things currently work:

• Creating Households on Contact insert requires a custom data entry screen
• Creating Contacts from outside systems and integrations leaves Contacts without a Household
• Keeping address and name data in sync between Contacts and Households is time consuming
• Pulling Household data into reports makes them more complicated than they need be

What We're Building

We're building out automated Householding with the following features:

• A Household is automatically created when a Contact is inserted into Sf.com
• No Contacts lack Households, ever.
• Households with no members are automatically deleted
• Households are automatically named for their members
• Household names and greetings can be overridden by the User when desired
• All Contacts in the same Household will share a Home address, which will stay in sync between Contacts and Household

Schema

• Contact
• Greeting Name and Household Name
• Household
• Assumes standard Householding from nonprofit template
• Override Household Name, Text, 255
• Override Greeting, Text, 255

Security

• Remove the Household Delete button from Page Layout. Deleting a Household is not handled by the code.

Triggers

• Contact
• ContactAddressChange.tgr
• ContactChangeHouseholdMembership.tgr
• ContactsInHouseholds.tgr
• Household
• HouseholdAddressChange.tgr
• HouseholdMemberCountChange.tgr
• HouseholdNamingOverride.tgr

Classes

• HouseholdMaintenance.cls

Tests

• Test_Households_and_Contacts.cls

test notes from code review:

test cases covered

• new contact (simple)
• new contact w/ last name only
• 2 new contacts w/ same name (should put in diff HH)
• 2 new contacts w/ same HH

- insert one, get HHid, insert 2nd w/ same HHId

• 3 new contacts w/ initially same last name

• chg 1 contact to diff last name
• set override greeting & HH name for HH (test trickle-down to contact)
• then remove overrides (test reverts to default)
• chg contact Home address (test HH address is chgd)
• chg HH address (test trickles down to HH mbrs)
• moving a contact into an existing HH (test names are right)

test not covered

• large sets
• chging name (esp. last name) of a contact (should trigger HH name chg unless overridden)
• undelete
• adding a contact w/ no addy to a HH that does have an addy (should adopt HH's addy)
• moving a contact into an existing HH (test addy is inherited)
• moving last contact in a HH into an existing HH (original HH is deleted)
• starting from a 2 person HH, split them up (i.e. null out the HHid field for one of the contacts, test that new hH is created)

NOTE:

• test undelete of opps, used to forget which conrole was primary