[SalesForce] How to determine whether a lead conversion was a merge to an existing contact or a new contact

Looking around the net it appears that the best place to hook into the Lead Conversion process is in a Trigger's After Update event.

I have a situation where I have a related object on a lead and upon conversion, for those that create a new Contact I want to do one thing, but if it's a merge with an existing contact I want to do another.

My problem is, I can't figure out how to know whether the merge was to an existing contact or new contact.

I would think that ConvertedContactId would give me a value for both new and merge?

    if (lead.IsConverted && !trigger.oldmap.get(lead.id).IsConverted) {
        // Handling conversion

        // Step 1 - get all existing Status Trackers for lead, that are not Existing Contacts
        //   and migrate to new Contact id

        // Step 2 - get all existing Status Trackers for lead -- that are for 
        //   existing Contacts and delete them
    }

Best Answer

This post provided the order of execution of triggers for Lead Conversion.

A couple of ways :

  • The Contact CreatedDate would be in the past, you could compare with a safety margin in mind, so you know that the Contact was created in advance of the Lead being converted.

  • The Contact triggers fire before the Lead triggers, therefore in a ContactBefore trigger you could add the ContactIds of records where the trigger.IsInsert to a static Map/ Set. Being static this would also be available in the lead after, where you can check if the ConvertedContactId was in this Set / Map of newly Created Contacts and then vary your behaviour based on that.

I can't for the life of me think of a simpler solution. (part of me wonders if the ConvertedContactId is available sooner, say in a LeadBefore trigger when it is converted into an existing contact)

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