How to share documents with customer community login users

Question

So we need to share a number of documents with our customers who our accessing our community using the Customer Community Login license. The documents that need to be shared are VF pages rendered as pdf's at various stages of an opportunity and are getting attached to a customers (person) account record via apex triggers.

How can we enable our customers to access these documents through the community since Content and Libraries are not accessible to Customer Community Licenses ?

Chatter Files doesn't seem like a good fit here since automatically adding pdf rendered pages to feeds/files seems quite complex, if at all possible.

This seems like a fairly standard requirement but we can't seem to figure this out.

Answer 1

As you appear to know, Opportunity is not visible to users with standard Community Customer Licenses. If these documents are being attached to Opportunity, the only way to share them with your Community Users is either to upgrade your Community Licenses to Partner Licenses or else create a Custom Object where these documents are synced via triggers where they're cloned or copied as new attachments to the Custom Object so you can then make them available to your standard Community Users.

You'll want to make certain that the original Opportunity related permissions don't propagate, preventing the records from being visible to portal users. That's why I say cloning or copying. Off hand, I'm not certain which would be the way you'd need to go. This is something you'll want to investigate further should you wish to go this route as permissions and ownership of records isn't always straight forward and I'm a bit too tired tonight to check for you.

Answer 2

Are these documents actually being saved to the record using Chatter Files or "Notes & Attachments" or are you wanting to render the visualforce page as a PDF and let the user view and/or download?

If you're just rendering the documents and not saving to the record, two things have to happen for Community user to see a Visualforce page. You'll want to Enable Visualforce Page Access to the Community, by going to Communities > Manage Communities > Force.com > Public Access Settings > Enable Visualforce Page Access. Next, is adding the page to the profile(s) of the community user(s), by going to Setup > Manage Users > Profile > Profile Name > Visualforce Page Access > Edit then move the page from the left column to the right.

If you've enabled Chatter Files, Community users can only see files that were uploaded INTO that community. (i.e., when an internal user with a full SFDC license uploads/creates a file and adds it to a record, the community users can't see it, eventhough you've shared the file with "The Entire Company" AND the community users have access to view the record.)

If you're using Chatter Files, you'll want to use a Trigger on ContentDocumentLink to share it from the Opportunity to the Person Account. (This will add it directly in the Files/Notes & Attachments related list and not post to the Chatter Feed at the top of the record.) Then you'd want to include this line of code in that apex trigger so when internal users create and attach the PDF, community users can see it:

UpdateContentDocumentLinkVisibilityOnInsert on ContentDocumentLink (before insert) { for(ContentDocumentLink. l:Trigger.new)l.Visibility='AllUsers'; }

If you're still using "Notes & Attachments" here's some additional info if community users still can't view them: "For the Customer Community license, access to Notes and Attachments for most objects is enabled by default. If your users with a Customer Community license can’t access Notes and Attachments on accounts and contacts, contact Salesforce." from https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=users_license_types_communities.htm&type=0#fntarg_8