Book Image

Mastering Apex Programming

By : Paul Battisson
5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Apex Programming

5 (1)
By: Paul Battisson

Overview of this book

As applications built on the Salesforce platform are now a key part of many organizations, developers are shifting focus to Apex, Salesforce’s proprietary programming language. As a Salesforce developer, it is important to understand the range of tools at your disposal, how and when to use them, and best practices for working with Apex. Mastering Apex Programming will help you explore the advanced features of Apex programming and guide you in delivering robust solutions that scale. This book starts by taking you through common Apex mistakes, debugging, exception handling, and testing. You'll then discover different asynchronous Apex programming options and develop custom Apex REST web services. The book shows you how to define and utilize Batch Apex, Queueable Apex, and Scheduled Apex using common scenarios before teaching you how to define, publish, and consume platform events and RESTful endpoints with Apex. Finally, you'll learn how to profile and improve the performance of your Apex application, including architecture trade-offs. With code examples used to facilitate discussion throughout, by the end of the book, you'll have developed the skills needed to build robust and scalable applications in Apex.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Triggers, Testing, and Security
8
Section 2 – Asynchronous Apex and Apex REST
15
Section 3 – Apex Performance

When to use Batch Apex

Batch Apex has a number of key use cases, which we will discuss here. But before discussing them, it is worth spending some time understanding how Batch Apex processes data.

As we will see in the following diagram, Batch Apex is great for working with large volumes of data. When utilizing Batch Apex, we define a set of data to be iterated over, either through a query or a custom iterable. Salesforce then chunks this data into batches and processes the batches one by one. So, if we had 200,000 records to process and wanted to process them in batches of 1,000, Salesforce would chunk the job into batches of 1,000 and process them one by one.

Refer to the following diagram:

Figure 8.1 – Batch processing

This makes Batch Apex fantastic at some tasks and less useful at others. Let's now look through some use cases where having these processes executed in a sequential series of batches makes the most sense.

Large data...