How do I manage access to "isArchived" field on Task?

Question

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EDIT

*For clarity, this is not a question of how to ensure Archived records are retrieved in a query. It is a matter of ensuring I, as an admin, am providing access to the field isArchive (so even on non-archived fields), if that's something an admin can configure through permission sets, profiles, or any other user settings.* If not, is this Read only across the board? Available to anybody who queries all fields on a record?

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Someone, on behalf of a third party system that grabs fields from the Task object, let us know that they weren't able to pull the field Task.isArchived (one part of the system they manage could, so they know it's missing, and another part with the same profile could not. I realize this is pretty vague, but it's just background for now).

I myself was not very familiar with this field, and realized I could query for it with apex anonymous queries, but as sys. admin can't see it as a "field" proper on the Task object, which makes me think this isn't exactly a field, but maybe something lower level to Salesforce?

I am trying to troubleshoot their issue and want to start by understanding the nature of this field. Since it's not something that i can just see as a field directly on Task to look at permissions, is this something that a permission set allows, to see if a record is "Archived"? Or some other user setting, perhaps? Something else?

What is an archived record anyway? Looking for as much as I can get on this! I have looked for documentation and couldn't really find anything, so feel free to direct me to something that exists already if I missed it.

Answer 1

Usually the first step is to go into Setup --> Object Manager --> Task and check if the IsArchived field is there so you can change field-level security. It's not.

The second thing to check, in case you believe it needs to be done by permission set, is within the field itself in the metadata. I like to check this on Workbench. If you click on Info --> Standard & Custom Objects

Select Task and expand on Fields

Click on IsArchived

The attribute you're looking for is permissionable. Looking at documentation

If you’re using a field whose permissionable property is false (such as any of the field types listed in this section), you can’t query, insert, update, or delete any field permissions records, because none exist

This, coupled with the fact you can't find this field on the UI to even give permissions per profile leads me to believe it's simply a read-only field by default. You shouldn't have any action to take to give anyone the ability to see it.

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Some background on Archived Activities. Salesforce does this to Tasks and Events that are over a year old.

Activity archive criteria:

• Events with an ActivityDateTime or ActivityDate value greater than or equal to 365 days old
• Tasks with an IsClosed value of true and an ActivityDate value greater than or equal to 365 days old
• Tasks with an IsClosed value of true, a blank ActivityDate field, and a create date greater than or equal to 365 days ago

It'd be interesting in how they're pulling the information as there's way to query that include Archived Activities and ways that do not. For example, utilizing queryAll() vs. query() through the SOAP API.

There's even a Knowledge Article about how to export archived activities through dataloader that's not necessarily relevant to your specific use case, but shows it matters how you go about pulling records to get that field vs. being able to give access to it.