There was much well deserved excitement around this finally being released:
However, one very critical, and very key component of this was not only left out, but there was no indication it was left out at all and what the expected behavior should be - the fact the lookups don’t actually *dynamically update*.
They refresh at the tenant level every 12 hours.
Here is an example:
- You set up a Data Designer (DD) that has a lookup to the Company MDA, which itself has been turned into an MDA object.
- You have a rule updating the Status of your Company records
- After this rule runs, your DD refreshes (within say 1 hour)
- You run a report on Company>Status and a report on the DD with Company>Status and whatever other fields you need
- You compare the two “Status fields” between the two objects - they will not match for as much as 12 hours. Any records that were updated by the rule, will not reflect in your DD even if the DD was refreshed right after the rule ran, and it is referencing the Company table via the new lookup method and there is nothing you can do about it*.
What does this mean?
- Refreshing your Data Designs will no longer give you the most up to date data on *any* object you have set up this lookup to.
- To be clear, if you’re not using the new lookups, the DD work as they always have as far as I can tell.
- Testing new data becomes more challenging, because if you need to use a lookup, then you have to wait 12 hours for everything to refresh???
- There is (as of this writing) no documentation on this limitation on what the delay is, how it works, when the syncing is, if it can be changed. Nothing. As bad as this lack of refresh is, it’s made worse by the fact it was not communicated in any way.
What is the ask?
- First and foremost - lookups should refresh on a per DD basis. If a data design refreshes, the expectation is that the data in there is accurate *at runtime*.
- Secondly - this needs to be documented, and *proactively* communicated to admins. Even just the current state. Adding the documentation is one thing, but making sure there is proactive outreach to admins is critical.
- In the short term, at the very least, reduce the time for this syncing
This is a glaring problem that undermines the one of the main utilities of this being released in the first place, and the fact that it is not documented anywhere is extremely disappointing to say the least.
*support has indicated it might be possible to reduce this time on a per tenant basis.
