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 a future method

There are two common use cases for future methods that most developers are familiar with—avoiding mixed DML errors and making background API requests. These are not the only use cases, but these are the two most common ones and so we will discuss them first.

Mixed DML

Certain sObjects cannot be used with other sObjects in DML operations without causing a mixed DML error. These are known as setup objects and are any object that affects a user's record access. The most common examples are when creating a User with a specified role, or updating a User and changing one of the following fields:

  • UserRoleId
  • IsActive
  • ForecastEnabled
  • IsPortalEnabled
  • Username
  • ProfileId

In these situations, it is a common practice to refactor the User (or another setup object) manipulation into a future method to be managed asynchronously. Most actions on these objects are not considered time-sensitive, for example, marking an inactive...