Force.com provides us with some special data manipulation wizards used for some specific operations. The mass transfer records wizard is used to change the owner of multiple users. The mass delete record wizard helps us delete multiple records in a single operation. Let us look at these two wizards in detail.
When we upload data records into the system they can be directly associated with the owner of the record, but if the owner is not specified they are associated with the person who uploads the record. In this case, it becomes tiresome to change the users on every record, especially when the records are large in numbers.
To solve this problem Force.com provides us with the mass transfer of records tool. It is a simple cloud-based utility that changes the ownership of the record from one owner to another. Let us see how to mass transfer the records from one user to another.
The mass transfer record requires the Mass transfer permission on the profile, and Edit and Read permission on the records being transferred. These permissions are available on the profile of the user; we will be studying the user profile in the Security Chapter later in the book.
To mass transfer records perform the following steps:
- Navigate to User Name | Setup | Administrative Setup | Data Management | Mass Transfer Records as shown in the following screenshot:
- Select the object to transfer, for example, let us select the Media object and transfer the records from one user to another as shown in the following screenshot:
- Select the user who we want to transfer the records from and the user who we want to transfer the record to. If we do not select the user to transfer records from, all the records filtered by the filters can be transferred. Click on Find.
- Based on the search criteria it will bring the records to transfer below the search box as shown in the screenshot. Select the records that you want to transfer and click on the Transfer button.
- The records are transferred immediately.
When we transfer the standard objects such as Account, we get additional options to transfer related records from the object such as transfer opportunities, and transfer cases, along with the Account object as shown in the following screenshot:
Some of the other data operations include cleaning the organization database using the mass delete wizard and deleting all data.
The mass delete wizard helps to clean the data from the organization. To mass delete records from the standard objects, perform the following steps:
- Navigate to User Name | Setup | Administrative Setup | Data Management | Mass Delete Records as shown in the following screenshot:
- For now, the Cloud Mass Delete Record tool only allows the mass deletion of standard objects. Let us try to delete a few accounts as an example. Select the Account object for mass deletion.
- On the next page, we get a complete single page wizard for mass account deletion. The first two steps are for information; step three is an account filter as shown in the next screenshot. The data filters are used to filter out the data for deletion.
- The next two steps in the wizard are additional information while deleting the records as shown in the next screenshot. These steps are unique for the Account object and other standard objects will have different steps.
- A final checkbox confirms if it is a hard delete or soft delete. If we choose to permanently delete the records, they cannot be recovered. Use this option only if you are absolutely sure you want to delete these records.
