Question

We are developing a grants management tool on the Salesforce Platform. The Web interface for grant seekers is in .NET and it communicates with Salesforce via API.

Issue: Fields that are part of the Salesforce Managed Package can’t be modified.

Specific issue and example: currency fields are all defined with 2 decimals in the Managed Package as this is what most Foundations (customers) want. But some Foundations would like not to display any decimals to the grant seeker (on the Web interface) for these managed package fields.

Question: Is there any way to overwrite the Managed Package field property for the number of decimals displayed (currently defined to show two decimals)?

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

I don’t know of a direct way to change the field settings in an installed managed package.

Some alternatives, with varying degrees of hackeness:

1. You could create a validation rule and formula field to fake it. Use the formula field for display layouts to show the value of the managed package field less the decimal places. Use the validation rule to stop users enter a value with decimal places (E.g. ROUND(number, num_digits)).
2. Create your own custom field with the desired number of decimal places. Only display your custom field on the page layout and hide the managed package field. Then copy the value from your custom field into the managed packages field when required. A before insert or before update trigger could handle this.