De-activating Case assignment rules when deploying a field-type change

Question

I have a custom field on the Contact object. And I changed it from picklist to multi-select picklist. This was referenced in Assignment rules.

When I deployed this to another Sandbox, even though I added the assignment rules in the change-set, the deployment failed saying that the field type cannot be changed as it is referenced in the Case Assignment rules.

I had to change the reference of the field (to some other field temporarily) on the case assignment rules of the target organization and then I could deploy it.

This means we need to break the assignment rules functionality every time we deploy a field type change ?

Is this a limitation on Salesforce ? Or Is there a better way to do this without breaking the functionality ?

Thanks in Advance !

Answer 1

Yes, I believe you will always run into that problem with your situation. To prevent bad functionality when changing the Assignment rule you could probably do something like this:

In Production, create a formula field that looks at the picklist field and then update the Assignment Rule to use at the formula field. This should allow you to update the picklist field without having to redeploy the assignment rule.

You might have to also add the formula field to your Sandbox and include it on your deployment, but that should not cause any issues.

Hope that works for you.

Luis Luciani