Nonprofit Starter Pack Upgrade Best Practices
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Upgrading packages in a salesforce.com instance with live data should be done carefully. We will continue to work to provide documentation of best practices but because we cannot know exactly what your instance of salesforce.com looks like, we cannot know what you might run into on upgrading.
- Always back up your data before upgrading packages
- Burn a sandbox of your production database and upgrade the sandbox first, checking for any errors
- Upgrade Contacts and Organizations package first, then Households, then the others
- Spend extra time testing if you have written any Apex code or have Workflow rules to make sure they don't conflict with package features
- Carefully follow any special instructions provided on the individual package install pages
When packages are installed, code is run to make sure everything is working. If these 'tests' pass, the package can install correctly. If the tests fail, the package won't install.
Tests may fail for lots of reasons, but there are a couple common ones. If you have required fields on objects related to the package, the tests may not be able to create records, causing test failure. The same is true of validation rules--the test has no way of knowing what rules you have, and so can't create records.
If you get an install failure, you can try again after you've turned off your required fields and validation rules.