Every once in a while, when debugging flows, you may come across an error such as “Unable to obtain exclusive access to this record or 1 records: 003OL00000EMzT8YAL”
At face value, this error message doesn’t seem to tell you very much. But appearances can be deceiving. Here’s what we actually know:
- There’s an issue about record-locking
- It relates to an contact record
How do you know it’s an contact? Because the record begins with “003”.
All records have a 3 digit prefix which tells you the object type. Here are some common ones:
- 001 = Account
- 003 = Contact
- 005 = User
- 006 = Opportunity
- 500 = Case
The full list can be found at Salesforce’s entity key prefix decoder, but just knowing these 5 can be helpful and even impressive.
By the way, all your custom objects also have a prefix, which are assigned during object creation.
The takeaway
Memorizing the common object prefixes can make you seem like a Salesforce wizard in front of your client.