How to check that the email Id on the person account selected on a case is null or not

Question

I want to check in my trigger on a case whether the email Id of the person account for the case is an null or not. I have a lookup to contact(person account) on the case page. How to achieve this.

for (case caseObj : trigger.new){
 ......
}

in this for loop I tried

caseObj.account.personal email == null;
caseObj.contact.email == null;
caseObj.ContactEmail == null;

but it didn't work out can anyone help.

Answer 1

The reason why your null tests fail is that in a Trigger on Case, the lookup objects are not in scope. To wit:

for (Case caseobj : Trigger.new)
    caseObj.contact.email == null;

Trigger.new will have in scope the fields on Case, but not the parent fields on account or contact. You need to query for these:

Map<ID,Case> caseIdToCaseWithParentMap = new Map<ID,Case>(
        [select id, contact.email from Case in :Trigger.new]);

for (Case caseobj: Trigger.new)
    if (caseIdToCaseWithParentMap.get(caseObj.id).contact.email == null) // do something 

Answer 2

Bhoopesh, one way you can access the related Contact record's Email value is to create a Formula (Text) field on the Case object called Contact Email (ContactEmail__c). The formula just needs to be: Contact.Email

Once you have this formula field, you'll be able to use this formula field to determine whether the Contact record has a blank Email, as demonstrated in the following example.

trigger RequireContactEmail on Case (before insert) {
    for (Case eachCase : Trigger.new) {
        System.assert(eachCase.ContactEmail__c != null,
            'The Contact must have an Email value');
    }
}

See the screenshot below for the definition of the formula field, paying special attention to the setting to treat blank fields as blanks.

Answer 3

I strongly suspect the problem you're having is that you're testing for "null". An email field is a special case of a text field. You need to be testing for isEmpty() == false. Your code should look more like this:

Boolean emlResult = caseObj.contact.email.isEmpty();
if(emlResult == true){

 // perform operation

}else{

// report no email address and do something else

}