Interview questions: Object Relationships

Question 1

1. What is the relationship in SF?

Answer 1

Connecting different objects with each other to replicate a real-life scenario/business
process is called a relationship.

Question 2

2. Why salesforce need object relationship?

Answer 2

To derive values and to prevent data inconsistency and repetition

Question 3

3. What are types of relationships in SFDC?

Answer 3

The Most common Relationships in SFDC are;
❖ Lookup Relationship
❖ Master Detail Relationship
❖ Many-to-Many Relationship

Question 4

4. What is a Lookup Relationship?

Answer 4

❖ No parent is required
❖ Roll-up summary fields cannot be available
❖ One object can have only 40 lookup relationships. Salesforce can increase it to 50 on
request.
❖ There is no impact on security
❖ This relationship does not have any dependency.

Question 5

5. What is a Master-Detail Relationship?

Answer 5

● Child record must have an associated parent
● Cascade record deletion
● Cascade record-level security
● Roll-up summary fields are available
● One object can have maximum 2 Master-Detail relationships.
● Standard objects CAN NOT be a detail object
● Standard objects CAN be a master object

Question 6

6. What is Many-to-Many relationship in Salesforce?

Answer 6

A Many-to-Many Relationship allows each record of one object to be linked to multiple
records from another object and vice versa. Junction object is used to create Many-to-Many Relationship.

Question 7

7. What is a junction object?

Answer 7

● Junction object is a custom object which relates two other objects via two
Master- Detail Relationships.
● Junction objects give us a way to create Many-to-Many Relationship between
Salesforce objects.
● Junction object records are deleted and placed in the Recycle Bin when either
associated master record is deleted
● If both associated master records are deleted, the junction object record is
deleted permanently and can’t be restored.

Question 8

8. What is roll-up summary?

Answer 8

● A roll-up summary field calculates values from related records, such as those in
a related list.
● You can create a roll-up summary field to display a value in a master record
based on the values of fields in a detail record.
● The detail record must be related to the master through a master-detail
relationship

Question 9

9. What are functions of Roll-up summary field?

Answer 9

● Count: It calculates the total number of records
● Sum: It totals the values of selected fields
● Min: It displays the lowest value
● Max:It displays the highest value

Question 10

10. What are various characters of Roll-up Summary fields?

Answer 10

● Roll-Up summary field can only be created for Master-Detail Relationship, not for
Lookup
● It derives the data from Child object
● It will show in Master Object
● We can not change field type of a field that we reference in a roll-up summary
field
● Auto number are not available
● Roll-up summary fields are not available for mapping lead fields of converted
fields.

Question 11

11. Is it possible to edit Roll-up summary field value in a record?

Answer 11

No, roll-up summary fields are read-only fields and they can not be edited.

Question 12

12. Is it possible to create Roll-up summary field on parent object?

Answer 12

Yes, we can create Roll-up summary field on parent object only with Master-Detail
relationship between objects

Question 13

13. Can we convert the Lookup relationship to Master Detail Relationship? If so how can we convert ?

Answer 13

Yes, we can convert Lookup relationship to Master-Details relationship.
Conversion can be done only if all the fields have valid Lookup field values. To convert
lookup to the master-detail relationship you need to give parent record on all child
records. This is because a master-detail relationship does not allow for ‘orphaned’ child
records. Once you have a lookup with each child having a parent than you can go back
and convert the lookup field to a master-detail

Question 14

14. What happens to Detail record when Master record is deleted?

Answer 14

Whenever Master record is deleted, its detail records will also be deleted. This is called
cascade-delete.

Question 15

15. What happens to Child record when a Parent record is deleted in Lookup
    Relationship?

Answer 15

When a master record is deleted in Lookup Relationship, child records are not be
deleted. So there is no cascade delete in Lookup relationship.

Question 16

16. What is the limitation for Lookup and Master-Detail Relationship per object?

Answer 16

You can have a maximum of two master details on an object.
For look-up relationship, You can have a maximum of 40 lookups per object.

Question 17

17. Although Account and Contact have a lookup relationship in Salesforce, why do
    related Contacts(child) get deleted when the parent Account is deleted?

Answer 17

We have Standard Relationships between Account and contact -it behaves as master
detail in business logics but on UI it is a lookup relationship, Though Contacts and
Accounts have a lookup relationship but this relationship has a property called
CascadeDelete set to true. This is why the contact is deleted when the parent object is
deleted.

You can create a contact without an account and such contacts are private so you
won’t be able to use them in reports and all. This shows that it is a Look up relation.

If you have created a contact with account and you delete that account then contact will be deleted, this shows that it is in Master-Detail relationship.

Question 18

18. What is the difference between Master-detail and Look-up relationship?

Answer 18