Apex Convert Positive Currency to Negative Currency

Question

I'm wondering if my syntax is off. My varCreditRefundAmount is a positive value and when I add it to a new transaction representing a refund, I want to convert it to a negative amount.

This is what I'm doing:

            newTransaction.ChargentOrders__Amount__c = varCreditRefundAmount * -1;

But I'm getting the error: Arithmetic expressions must use numeric arguments

Is it my syntax or could I be doing something else wrong? The value in the variable is a currency and the field I'm trying to send it to is also currency.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Some languages allow a bit more fluidity in data types (weakly/loosely typed languages), but not Apex. Apex is "strongly typed", which means that there's basically no flexibility. If something expects to be passed something like an Integer or Decimal, you can't pass it a String instead.

That's the case here. You're trying to multiply a string and a number, and since that operation isn't defined, you get an error.

If you're taking a currency, then you'd probably want to store that as a Decimal (Double would likely also work, but I believe Decimal is the better fit).

Changing the type of the input to your invocable method to be Decimal would be the preferred approach, I think. If for some reason that isn't possible, as long as you don't have currency symbols or decimal separators in your string, (e.g. '3,000.00' and '$3000.00' would be bad, but '3000.00' is fine), then you can use the valueOf() method provided by the Decimal class to convert it to a decimal.

e.g. Decimal converted = Decimal.valueOf(givenInputString);