A Tip A Day #21 – PriceBookEntry Creation with StandardPrice

This post is a part of the daily blog series 

A Tip A Day, daily dosage of learning!

Day #21 – PriceBookEntry Creation with StandardPrice

We have a Product with a standard price of say $100.  As shown below, in Salesforce UI, it is easy to add a product and add a standard price (related list).  We can also associate the Product to another custom Price Book by clicking on the Add to Price Book button in Price Books related list.

Note here that the custom price book entry has the checkbox “Use Standard Price” ticked which implies that if the standard price is changed for this product, the custom price book entry will also reflect the same.  This is a very useful feature.

Requirement

Now the requirement is that we need to do the same via API as in an Apex class or an Apex trigger automatically.  This sounds simple, but there is a catch!

Attempt 1: If you do simple pricebookentry creation like this:

PricebookEntry pbe = new PricebookEntry(
        Pricebook2Id='xxxxxx',
        IsActive=true, 
        Product2Id='xxxxxx', 
        UseStandardPrice=true
        );
    insert pbe;

You’d get this error

Error 1: REQUIRED_FIELD_MISSING, Required fields are missing: [UnitPrice]: [UnitPrice]

Attempt 2: Okay, so I add the UnitPrice, but then it gives another error

PricebookEntry pbe = new PricebookEntry(
    Pricebook2Id='xxxxx',
    IsActive=true, 
    Product2Id='xxxxx', 
    UseStandardPrice=true,
    UnitPrice = 0.70
    );

insert pbe;

Error 2: Insert failed. First exception on row 0; first error: FIELD_INTEGRITY_EXCEPTION, field integrity exception

Attempt 3: I read that UseStandardPrice==true cannot be set. It has to be false as per the help document help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=000193277&type=1

PricebookEntry pbe = new PricebookEntry(
    Pricebook2Id='xxxxx',
    IsActive=true, 
    Product2Id='xxxxx', 
    UseStandardPrice=false,
    UnitPrice = 0.70
    );

insert pbe;

Result: Setting it to False actually inserts the record. But I want it to be set to true.  No error, but not the solution as I want UseStandardPrice==true

Final Solution

I have figured out that we cannot set UseStandardPrice=true on insert. On insert it has to be set to False first, along with mentioning UnitPrice. Then later do an additional update to set the UseStandardPrice=false

PricebookEntry pbe = new PricebookEntry(
    Pricebook2Id='xxxxx',
    IsActive=true, 
    Product2Id='xxxxx', 
    UseStandardPrice=false,
    UnitPrice = 0.70
    );

insert pbe;

pbe.UseStandardPrice = true;
update pbe;

There you go!  Perfect.  It worked.  2 DMLs though, but it works.

Here’s the full code if you want to do the same in a test class.

Read all other tips of the blog series here – A Tip A Day, daily dosage of learning!