It’s about time

The title of this post really refers to two things. First, the fact that I’ve taken a few weeks off from blogging (mental holiday), and it’s about time that I get back into my weekly posts. And secondly, the actual content for today’s post, which is one of my most tactical posts; this one deals with time stamping. And really, the idea for this post came about when a co-worker was looking at some a timestamp function that I had created & assumed it was done via a trigger, and asked if I could re-create it for him on another object. But in reality, all I did was use formulas and workflow rules creatively – just another lesson learned on the path to dabbling dev.

What this co-worker wanted to do was timestamp when a case was taken out of a queue. Seems pretty simple, and it is with just one formula field,  one date/time field, one workflow rule and one field update.

First, the formula field:

The date/time field is just a standard one.

Next, the workflow rule:

Finally, your workflow action, a field update:

And there you have it! A simple way to capture the time a record was taken from a queue.