Best practices–dependencies in forms

An observation more than anything, but I’m seeing this happening every now and then, and it’s worth putting it out there.

With great power comes great responsibility.

The platform allows us to create new forms by simply opening an existing form and selecting Save As. We tend to use that, as it’s easy to start from an existing form, and make small changes when creating new forms. But, as easy as that is, it has the potential to create a big problem.

Some existing forms have dependencies on other solutions. Sometimes, these dependencies are on scripts from other managed solutions. If, later on, we decide to remove those solutions, we are faced with dependency errors blocking us from removing those solutions.

We’re all pressed for time when working on some projects. It’s easy to copy a form to a new one, make the necessary changes and publish. The more we do this, the more dependencies we create. And when cleanup time comes, we have to actually go through many forms and remove these dependencies. In fact, we should have done this from the beginning.

One good example is the Insights solution. Now that the solution has been marked as discontinued, some customers want to have it removed. It is a managed solution, so you would thing it’s as easy as selecting and deleting the solution. It should remove cleanly, right?

Well, if you used the Save As method on the default forms in Contact and Account, you will find that it’s not that easy. Those forms have a reference to a script that’s part of the Insights solution. And, when you copied the form to create new forms, you took a dependency on that script too. Now, you have to go back and remove those script references from all the forms you created in that manner.

Lesson

Do things right the first time. If you do a Save As on a form, make sure you remove the dependencies you don’t need. Don’t rush to publish and mark the task done until you checked and made sure you only have the configurations you really need.

Action item

Have you seen this before? Have you done this before? Do you have any feedback? Leave a comment below!