Trigger Lead Owner assignment not working for Web to Lead Form records

Question

HI Folks,

Got into some interesting scenario, Need your suggeestion to understand this issue.

Below is the Order of Execution for Lead owner assignment that we have

Scenario : Mode of Lead creation in the system is through Web-to-Lead form

1) Trigger (Before Insert):- This trigger based on some logic assigns lead to an one of the existing user only if the Logic meets the business requirement

1) Lead Assignment Rule :- If Lead owner is not assigned in above trigger then Assignment rules does the owner assignment based on some criteria

ISSUE :

Trigger is not able to assign the owner though it finds the mataches and does not even throw the error. This happens only for those leads which are getting created through web to lead form.

Some one suggested me to create an one more Rule Entry to existing Assignment Rule , with empty criteria and Do Not Reassign Owner checkbox checked. Which i did and Trigger started working.

I still dint understand the use of this check box and how it is related to it.

Answer 1

Assignment rules always fire for web-to-lead, and the assignment occurs after the initial database commit, so the owner field would be clobbered by the assignment rule. Furthermore, if the rule fails to find an owner, the default lead owner is used instead. So, in order to prevent the rule from changing the owner, there must be an entry that uses the "do not reassign owner" checkbox. This prevents the default lead owner from taking over the record.