By now, you have hopefully logged in to your Developer Edition of the Salesforce1 Platform and created some sample data. You might have noticed that in order to create a new record, you must fill out any required fields. You might have already played with the workflow feature we mentioned earlier, which can modify a record upon save. If you're really eager, you can even experiment with validation rules, which can prevent a record from being saved if it does not meet your preset criteria. All of these various features make the simple act of saving a record a very complex process. To make things more complex, triggers are executed in two places in this process.

The first place in the process where a trigger is executed occurs before a record is committed to the database. Triggers that execute at this time are commonly referred to as before triggers. They are used to intercept a record that is being sent to the database. This is the perfect time to validate the record against...