We've received a number of questions from customers on the impact of Salesforce to Salesforce on existing or new validation rules and apex triggers. The reality is when two companies connect their salesforce.com instances, in most cases each company has its own unique set of validation criteria and triggers. Additionally, these criteria might be looking at fields that haven't even been shared between the connected companies. Today, if a customers accepts a record from a connection and that record fails to meet validation or trigger criteria we provide a generic error message stating: 0 records accepted. It is on our roadmap to provide more useful error messages as well as log these errors in the Connection Audit so the customer can do something about it.

There is a way, however, for customers to bypass validation rules and triggers when either accepting a record from a connection or receiving an update on a connected record from the connection. The basic idea here is that we bypass these organization specific rules when first accepting the record or when a connection updates the record but these same rules are enforced if an internal user creates a new record or updates an existing record. This is how most of our customers have configured their connections. Once you make these changes - you're organization's rules will be Salesforce to Salesforce aware. It is good practice to include the tasks below in any S2S roll-out plan or when creating a validation rule or apex trigger.

Changes to Validation rules: the following should be included within an 'AND' statement with the rest of the rule

Text version:

IF(OR(ISNEW(), ISNULL(Id)), if(ConnectionReceivedId =null, TRUE, FALSE),NOT(AND(ISCHANGED(ConnectionReceivedId), NOT(ConnectionReceivedId = null)))),

NOT(Contains($User.Alias, "pnet"))

Example of Apex Trigger that is S2S aware: sample below is on Opportunities (same logic for other objects)

Apex trigger

Apex class

If you have any questions on this topic, email: s2s@salesforce.com