execute logic beforedelete event trigger

Question

Before deleting the record (Ex: Account obj record), I want to update the field on the account record and send it to content management, hold it for a few seconds, and then delete it.

For this scenario, I used beforedelete event and updated the fields in the record, and called the content management with updated record data. The record is updated with new values (i verified after restoring it from recycle bin), But it is not calling the content management before deleting the record. Is there any option that we can wait for a few seconds until the record is updated on content management and delete the record? Please share your suggestions. Thank you.

Answer 1

You can't make a callout straight from a trigger (SF database table/row can't be locked and held hostage until 3rd party system finishes, up to 2 minutes), it has to be asynchronous. So you probably call from @future but by then the main trigger finished, the record is deleted, if you passed an Id - probably the query inside @future returns 0 rows.

Forget the bit about "holding it for few seconds". You need to make some architecture decisions. Is it important that delete succeeds no matter what? or do you want to delete only after the external system acknowledged the message?

1. You could query your record in the trigger (or take whole trigger.old) and pass to the future method? It's supposed to take only primitives, not objects/collections but you could always JSON.serialize it before passing as string.

2. You could hide the standard delete button and introduce custom one. There you'd have a controller which can make the callout, wait till success response comes back and then delete?

3. You could rethink the request-response thing. What if you make the callout (or raise platform event?) and it's the content management system that then reaches to salesforce and deletes (via REST API for example).

4. What if you just delete right away, hope they stay in recycle bin and then external system can query the bin / make special getDeleted call and pull the data.

See Salesforce - Pull all deleted cases in Salesforce for some more bin-related api calls.