The Implications of Cascading Ownership
By Joe Gill
Published On 4th March 2015
When a user changes the owner of a record in Dataverse they can be surprised by what happens to its related records. By default assigning a new owner to a record also changes the owner of all its related records and all their activities. This includes completed activities.
This is because the default behaviour for parental relationships is to cascade the action on a parent to all its related records. If we look at the number of parental relationships for the account entity you start to get an indication of how much cascading can happen and the potential performance impact. In particular the impact of a Parent Account and the number of related contacts.
Something else to be aware of is that when the ownership is cascaded to activities then the modified date is updated to the current date and this can be confusing for the users when they view the social pane. There is no way to prevent this and as change of ownership is considered a modification.
You can configure the cascading behaviour of a relationship and the options are as follows
- Cascade All – default
- Cascade Active – Only cascade for active records
- Cascade User Owned – cascades for related records where the owner is the parent records owner
- Cascade None – no cascading
In the example below I have configured cascading off for the related contacts for an account. So if the owner of an account is changed the owner for its contacts do not.
Note: If you use the “Reassign Records” option on the user record form then all the records owned by that user are reassigned to the new owner and any configurable cascading rules are ignored. This option is usually used before you disable an user.
