Debugging tip

I learned something about debugging today that I thought I would share, because it will almost-certainly help me remember it in the future.

I have a client who has an integration that runs daily, and every single day we get a few failures. There’s not enough info in the Jitterbit logs to tell us what’s going on. Looks like a simple DML issue: “This error occurred: CANNOT_INSERT_UPDATE_ACTIVATE_ENTITY: OpportunityTrigger: execution of BeforeUpdate caused by: System.DmlException: Insert failed. First exception on row 0; first error: INSUFFICIENT_ACCESS_ON_CROSS_REFERENCE_ENTITY, insufficient access rights on cross-reference id: [] ()“. Okay, so it’s a cross-reference ID issue, but there’s no ID, so what gives? I’ve been seeing it for months; never thought anything of it.

Today, my client sent me the ID of a record that demonstrates the problem if you try to update the Account manually. So I did that, and I happened to have the Dev Console open. Turns out, the error message you receive in Salesforce has more detail if the Dev Console is open (assuming you have a decent level of detail enabled in your log settings in the Dev Console). That led me to the exact line # in that Opportunity Trigger Handler that was failing, due to a NULL reference. So now a problem that has been happening for MONTHS and MONTHS is fixed, because I happened to have the Dev Console open while I was troubleshooting something.

Learn something new every day.