During a Salesforce project, when planning for data migrations, it’s common to review automations and validation rules to determine which ones should be temporarily disabled.
Not all automations usually need to be deactivated, but keeping some active might accidentally cause unwanted behavior.
However this approach has a few drawbacks.
For one, it assumes that all users will be “hands-off keyboard” during the data migration. Even if you’re doing the migration after-hours or over the weekend, there may be a user or two that sneaks into the system. If they do, and perform an action that’s supposed to trigger automation… well, you now have invalid data.
Secondly, if the data migration will take several days, it’s hard to believe keeping all users off the system is a viable option.
Lastly, if there will be multiple data migrations throughout the year, this approach loses most of its appeal.
So, what else can we do?
Here’s one approach:
- Create a new user called “Automation User” with a System Administrator profile.
- In all your flows, add a first element that checks whether the current user is “Automation User”. If it is, stop the flow. If it’s not, continue as usual.
- In all validation rules, add an exception for “Automation User”.
The takeaway
Using an Automation User is a great way to disable automation and validation rules for data migrations, while keeping things running smoothly for all other users.