Question

I’m writing an integration between Salesforce.com and another service, and I’ve hit a problem with integer fields. In Salesforce.com I’ve defined a field of type “Number” with “Decimal Places” set to “0”. In the other service, it is stored definitively as an integer. These two fields are supposed to store the same integral numeric values.

The problem arises once I store a value in the Salesforce.com variant of this field. Salesforce.com will return that same value from its Query() and QueryAll() operations with an amount of precision incorrectly appended.

As an example, if I insert the value “827” for this field in Salesforce.com, when I extract that number from Salesforce.com later, it will say the value is “827.0”.

I don’t want to hard-code my integration to remove these decimal values from specific fields. That is not maintainable. I want it to be smart enough to remove the decimal values from all integer fields before the rest of the integration code runs. Using the Salesforce.com SOAP API, how would I accomplish this?

I assume this will have something to with DescribeSObject()‘s “Field” property where I can scan the metadata, but I don’t see a way to extract the number of decimal places from the DescribeSObjectResult.

Answer 1

Ah ha! The number of decimal places is on a property called Scale on the Field object. You know you have an integer field if that’s equal to “0”.