AppExchange Test Drive prompting for username and password- Solved

Stock image of Volkswagen beetleAppExchange 'Test Drive' prompting for username and password - Solved

The Salesforce AppExchange has a very useful feature for any companies listing an App for sale. 

It's called Test Drive and allows you as the publisher of an app to set up and configure a demonstration environment for your app and then link it to your listing.


Once created, any customer who is interested in seeing how your app works can load it up (even if they do not have a Salesforce account) and experiment with it. 

The user license that is associated with the test drive is 'Read Only' which means that the user cannot make any changes to the demo environment. This is really useful as it will ensure that all customers taking a Test Drive will get the same experience.


 The Problem

A customer should be able to visit your listing on the AppExchange, click Test Drive, enter a few details and then be taken straight into the demonstration Salesforce environment.

However, last week I was working with a customer's who Test Drive link just took the customer to an empty Salesforce login page.

Image of Salesforce login page 
The listing was linked to the Test Drive org with the correct username and password and changing the password and re-linking the listing to the Test Drive produced the same result.


The Solution

After a lot of head-scratching I found a Success Community post from Roshan Khotele who had reported a similar problem back in 2014. Luckily for me he had also added a solution afterward.

Roshan suggested changing the test drive user password to a value that didn't include any special characters such as *, !, & et cetera. I followed his advice and it solved the problem!

I am glad that we could find a solution to this problem but I'm curious why this apparent glitch hasn't been fixed by Salesforce yet. Perhaps there is a key reason why the test drive user password cannot have special characters.  

More information

Image from Pexels, artist revac film and photography.

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