Using Apex Managed Sharing to share an opportunity

Question

Here's the use case. When a lead is converted to an Opportunity, I want to automatically share the opportunity with the previous owner of the lead. This is needed because upon conversion, the opportunity ownership is granted to someone else but the original lead owner needs ongoing access to the opportunity.

So:

• A partner submits/creates a lead and is the lead owner
• Lead is converted to opportunity and internal sales person gains ownership
• Original partner needs to have view/edit access on this opportunity

I know you can use Apex Managed Sharing to share a custom object, but I'm hitting a wall trying to do this with an opportunity since the fields in OpportunityShare are not writable. The following won't even compile as a result:

List<OpportunityShare> oppShares = new List<OpportunityShare>();
for(Id i : oppIds)
{
   OpportunityShare os = new OpportunityShare(OpportunityId = i);
   os.OpportunityId = i; // *** ERROR - not writable ***
   os.OpportunityAccessLevel = 'Read/Write';
   os.UserOrGroupId = oppIdToLead.get(i).OwnerId;
   os.RowCause = 'Manual Sharing';
   oppShares.add(os);
}

Database.SaveResult[] result = Database.insert(oppShares, false);

Answer 1

This works in my org (I modified a little to allow for missing variables). Once I commented out the row cause, I was able to compile it...if you do that, does it still fail? If so, what's the error?

Set<Id> oppIds = new Set<Id> ();
Id newOwnerId;
List<OpportunityShare> oppShares = new List<OpportunityShare>();
for(Id i : oppIds) {
   OpportunityShare os = new OpportunityShare();
   os.OpportunityId = i; 
   os.OpportunityAccessLevel = 'Read/Write';
   os.UserOrGroupId = newOwnerId;
  // os.RowCause = 'Manual Sharing';
   oppShares.add(os);
}

Database.SaveResult[] result = Database.insert(oppShares, false);

Answer 2

You may want to take a look at the RowCause and OpportunityAccessLevel values. For Manual sharing the RowCause would be 'Manual' or leave it blank and it should default. For the OpportunityAccessLevel, to accomplish Read/Write try using 'Edit' as the value.

Also realize that this isn't really Apex Managed Sharing in the sense that its not using a custom sharing reason. Unfortunately, only custom objects can have custom sharing reasons defined so you certainly can add sharing records via Apex as you're trying to do for Opportunities but be careful because if the Owner of that record changes the manual shares will be removed as it will treat your Apex-added shares as if the owner manually added via the Share button.

http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/apexcode/Content/apex_bulk_sharing_creating_with_apex.htm