What is the right way to query all Notes & Attachments?
Salesforce has two sorts of notes and attachments. There's the Classic type, represented by the Note
and Attachment
sObjects, and the Lightning type, represented by the Content suite of objects - ContentDocument
, ContentVersion
, ContentDocumentLink
, and ContentNote
. These two types are accessed in quite different ways.
The classic Note
and Attachment
records have a single polymorphic lookup to the record to which they're attached. You can query them simply:
List<Note> notes = [SELECT Id FROM Note WHERE ParentId = :myRecord];
List<Attachment> attachments = [SELECT Id FROM Attachment WHERE ParentId = :myRecord];
In the Lightning world of Content, the object model is quite a bit more complex. Both Notes and Attachments are represented as ContentDocument
, a parent object over potentially multiple ContentVersion
records. The ContentDocument
is then linked to all of the locations in which it's been shared, which may be many, via ContentDocumentLink
.
To make things even more confusing, there's a facade object, ContentNote
, that acts like a ContentDocument
with a single ContentVersion
inherent in its Content
field. You'll mostly have to worry about ContentNote
if you're adding Notes, however.
Anyway - not to try to summarize the substantial complexity involved in the Content system - to query both Notes and Attachments in the Lightning style for some object whose Id is myRecord
, you'd do
List<ContentDocumentLink> cdls = [SELECT ContentDocumentId FROM ContentDocumentLink WHERE LinkedEntityId = :myRecord];
Set<Id> documentIds = new Set<Id>();
for (ContentDocumentLink cdl : cdls) {
documentIds.add(cdl.ContentDocumentId);
}
// ContentDocumentLink doesn't support semi-joins, which is frustrating.
List<ContentDocument> documents = [SELECT Id FROM ContentDocument WHERE Id IN :documentIds];
This will return both ContentNote
and regular ContentDocument
Attachments. If you want just Notes, query on ContentNote
rather than ContentDocument.
If you want just Attachments and not Notes, filter on FileType != 'SNOTE'
.
To get the actual content, for ContentDocument
, you can execute a ContentVersion
query against ContentDocumentId
and IsLatest = true
. For ContentNote
, you can simply ask for the Content
field in your ContentNote
query, which is a Blob field.
To delete records, you only need to delete
the top-level ContentDocument
record. That will take the ContentDocumentLink
records with it. Deleting ContentDocumentLink
records may make an Attachment inaccessible, but it won't be deleted entirely.