What are the implications of trying to modify a rollup summary field?

Question

I have tried manually modifying it and it seems possible, but I am not sure if there are any unintended side effects.

My requirement is to have a logging summary table that rolls up the details of another fine grained logging table. However, it should be possible to disable generation of fine grained records, while still having the summary table maintain information.

I can guarantee that there will be no additions/removals to the child object when the rollup object is being updated.

I was just wondering whether there was some background process that periodically refreshes/updates the values, such that even if I were to enter something, the values would eventually get replaced? If anyone has done something like this before, please let me know.

Answer 1

@coldspeed,

I doubt if you would be able to modify values within a Salesforce provided Roll-up Summary field since they are auto computed and are non editable. Once configured the Roll-up Summary fields are computed every time the child records are added, modified or deleted automatically.

In case you are using custom logic such as Apex triggers or Process Builders to aggregate the data from child records, modifying the aggregated values to override the computation in the aggregated field, would lead to data inconsistencies and is not something that I would recommend.

I would recommend creating an additional field that copies the aggregated data from the Rollup Summary field. You can then override the aggregated data within the additional field so as to have access to the original aggregated data as well as the overridden one.