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I see this question once in awhile on the Salesforce.com message boards so I thought I’d put something together. So in this scenario you have a Sales_Order__c custom object which has a lookup relationship to Opportunity. When processing the Sales_Order__c records in your trigger, you want to access some fields on the Opportunity via the relationship. Your trigger might look something like this:
trigger SalesOrderUpdate on Sales_Order__c (before update) {
for (Sales_Order__c so : Trigger.new) {
System.debug('Opportuny Id: '+so.Opportunity__c);
// Opportunity__r will be NULL
System.debug('Opportuny: '+so.Opportunity__r.StageName);
}
}
However, every time you run the Trigger, the Opportunity is null even though there is a valid Id in Opportunity__c. The reason is that for scalability, the Force.com platform doesn’t perform an in-memory lookup for each relationship in your object. You need to do that yourself. The good thing is that the solution is relatively painless and is safe for bulk transactions.
In the trigger below you first want to create a set of unique Opportunity Ids that are in the trigger context. You then use those Ids to query and create a map with the Opportunity Id as the key and the Opportunity object as the value. Then when you process your Sales_Order__c records you can access the Opportunity object from the map by its Id (line 14).
trigger SalesOrderUpdate on Sales_Order__c (before update) {
// create a set of all the unique opportunity ids for SOQL below
Set oppIds = new Set();
for (Sales_Order__c so : Trigger.new)
oppIds.add(so.Opportunity__c);
// create a map so that Opportunity is locatable by its Id (key)
Map oppsMap = new Map(
[SELECT Amount, StageName FROM Opportunity WHERE Id IN :oppIds]);
for (Sales_Order__c so : Trigger.new) {
// fetch the Opportunity from the map by its Id
System.debug('Opportunity: '+oppsMap.get(so.Opportunity__c).StageName);
// perform some type of business operation now...
}
}
