A Tip A Day #23 – 5 Ways To Stop Trigger In Production

This post is a part of the daily blog series 

A Tip A Day, daily dosage of learning!

Day #23 – FIVE Ways To Stop Trigger In Production

In a scenario, you no longer want to use the functionality in your trigger and want to turn it off in your Salesforce production org, as in make the trigger Inactive, follow one of these 5 options.  Unlike in sandbox, where you can edit a trigger to uncheck the “Active” checkbox, you cannot do the same in a Production instance.  Its not that straightforward.

Note:  Many a times, you’d face a code coverage (less than 75%) issue while deactivating the trigger in production with any of the 5 approaches I mentioned below.  Just make sure, your overall code coverage is well above 75%.  Specially, if the trigger you are turning off has lots of code, it will definitely impact your overall code coverage.  So, be ready with your test classes for the other existing apex classes/triggers.

Bonus: 3 of the approaches mentioned below can also be used to Delete a class in production.

Read my other post – 3 Ways to delete an Apex class from Production

Here are your 5 options.  You can choose whatever is easier for you, there’s no recommendation here.

1. DEACTIVATE THE TRIGGER

This is the simplest way to do of all.  Deactivate your trigger in your sandbox by unchecking the Active checkbox of the trigger.  Create an outbound change set, upload and deploy the change set to production.  Tadah! The trigger in production will be deactivated.

2. COMMENT TRIGGER CODE

This is simpler than the simplest, comment your entire apex trigger code in your sandbox and then use outbound change set to deploy to production.  To comment code, you need to use /* and */ .  Anything in between those will be commented.

trigger opportunityTrigger on opportunity (before insert){
   /*
     your entire code
   */
}

Apex Class Deletion: This approach also can be followed to let an apex class be NOT used in production.

trigger oppTrigger on opportunity (before insert){
  Trigger_Settings__c TS = Trigger_Settings__c.getValues('oppTrigger');
  if(TS.is_Active__c == TRUE){
    //your trigger code
  }
}

So, every time you want to turn off the trigger in production, just go to your custom settings and uncheck the IsActive checkbox for that trigger! Simple! The trigger first checks the custom settings, knowing it is off, it won’t run at all !

Note: As pointed out in the comments section, if you’d like the trigger to be turned on/off for particular profiles, you can further play around with your custom settings to include Profiles and trigger status!

4. USING ECLIPSE IDE

This is similar to change set approach but here you would make the trigger InActive in the trigger’s XML file and then deploy from Eclipse.

5. THROUGH ANT

Here’s a way to do using ANT tool.

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