How does ownerid differ from owner.id?

334 Asked by Aalapprabhakaran in Salesforce , Asked on Apr 26, 2023

Trying to write some test code for a custom object and its controller class. I noticed that one of my methods which depends on the ownership of an object was bugging out and I discovered that Owner.Id and OwnerId are returning different values. Are they supposed to be different? Which one am I supposed to use? Here is an example.

    Conversation__C convA = new Conversation__C();
    convA.FromNumber__c = '1231231231';
    convA.ToNumber__c = '2342342342';
    insert convA;
    List conversationsT = [Select OwnerId, Owner.Id from Conversation__c ];
    for (Conversation__c c : conversationsT)
        System.debug(c.Owner.Id + ' ' + c.OwnerId);
returns
09:38:01:200 USER_DEBUG [68]|DEBUG|null mySalesforceID 
The strange thing is that both return the same data in production!

Answered by Abdul Rehman

You should use OwnerId. I am not sure why there is a difference in values, and will try to reproduce. But there is no reason to introduce a cross-object reference when all you need is the Id value itself.

One example why Owner.Id is less preferable:

system.debug(c.get('OwnerId')); // works

system.debug(c.get('Owner.Id')); // fails

You can get the cross-reference to work, but it's definitely more complicated.

Another reason it's less preferable is that you can't set it that way. Might as well be consistent.

c.OwnerId = idValue; // works

c.Owner.Id = idValue; // cannot update in this manner

How does ownerid differ from owner.id?

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