I have some global code in a managed package that is used by some non-packaged (source) code in a customer’s org. An upgrade of the managed package broke the non-packaged code in a rather confusing way. The runtime error reported was:
System.TypeException: Invalid conversion from runtime type DefaultContactHistorySource to ContactHistorySource
where ContactHistorySource was a recently introduced managed package global interface and DefaultContactHistorySource was a recently introduced non-global implementation of that interface. Neither of these was used directly by the non-packaged code.
The work-around (discovered after many hours of failure) was to simply change the version number of the managed package that the non-packaged code depended on via the “Version Settings” tab. It appears that although ContactHistorySource and DefaultContactHistorySource were not being used directly, some version filtering was nevertheless being applied – perhaps because ContactHistorySource was global. Unfortunately the error that was reported didn’t offer much help in identifying the problem. This is also a rather nasty case of a managed package upgrade breaking existing code.
Other things to watch out for with managed packages are Add “Deployment Status” to the check-list… and Always double check that managed packages are deployed.
