Frequently-Occurring Fields

In addition to System Fields, the following fields are found on many objects:

OwnerId
RecordTypeId
CurrencyIsoCode

OwnerId

Objects have an ownerId field that is an reference to the user who owns that object. Ownership is an important concept that affects the security model and has other implications throughout the system. Any user can query the owner field for any record they can access. However, setting the ownerId field has the following limitations:

For most users and most objects, this field cannot be set directly upon insert. It is implicitly set to the current user when inserting an object.
When creating or updating a Case or Lead, a client application (that is logged in with sufficient permissions to transfer a record) can set this field to any valid User in the organization or to any valid queue of the appropriate type in the organization.
Updating this field via the API changes only the owner of that record. The change of ownership does not cascade to associated records as it does when you transfer record ownership in the Salesforce.com user interface.
Updating this field on an account deletes the existing sharing information and reapplies the organization-wide sharing defaults and sharing rules.

In API version 12.0 and later, if your organization has set up sales teams, OwnerId fields behave the same for Account and Opportunity objects as for other objects. That is, if you update the OwnerId field in either object, any AccountShare or OpportunityShare records are kept. In API version 11.0 and earlier, the sharing records are deleted.

RecordTypeId

Record types are used to offer different business processes and subsets of picklist values to different Users based on their Profile settings. (In addition, person accounts use record types to manage a number of additional elements. For more information, see What is a Person Account? in the Salesforce.com online help.)

Record types are configured in the Salesforce.com user interface or by creating, editing, or deleting the RecordType object in the API. A client application can also retrieve the list of valid record type IDs (String) for a given object by calling query() on the RecordType object.

The RecordTypeId field in an object contains the ID of the RecordType that is associated with a standard or custom object. Client applications can set this field in create() or update() calls.

Note

You cannot create() or update() the RecordTypeId field on the CampaignMember object. Set the CampaignMember record type using the CampaignMemberRecordTypeId field on the Campaign.

If specified in a create() or update() call, the record type ID (String) must refer to a valid record type for that object. (For more information about ID fields, see ID Field Type.)

Note

The RecordTypeId field will appear in your WSDL file only if at least one record type is configured for your organization in the Salesforce.com user interface.

CurrencyIsoCode

For organizations that have multicurrency enabled, the CurrencyIsoCode field contains the string representation of the currency ISO code associated with currency values in the object. Note that the User object also has a DefaultCurrencyIsoCode field, which is the default currency for that user. For example, a user in France could have a DefaultCurrencyIsoCode set to Euros, and that would be their default currency in the application. However, the User object could have currency custom fields stored in a different currency.