Apex Bulkification

What is Apex Bulkification?

Apex bulkification is a Salesforce development practice that involves processing records in batches, rather than one at a time, to ensure efficient use of resources and compliance with platform limits. This technique is crucial in Salesforce's multi-tenant environment, where resources are shared among many users.

Why Bulkification is Important

Salesforce has set governor limits to ensure equitable resource distribution among all users. These limits dictate the number of records you can process in a single transaction, among other things. Without bulkification, your code might quickly hit these limits, resulting in runtime exceptions and failed operations. Bulkification helps you:

• Reduce the number of DML statements and SOQL queries.
• Optimize performance and resource utilization.
• Prevent runtime exceptions due to governor limit violations.

Basic Examples of Bulkification

Consider a scenario where you need to update several records. Instead of updating each record individually, you should process them in a single operation. Here's a basic example:

Bulkifying Trigger Code

When writing Apex triggers, it's essential to handle bulk records efficiently. Triggers can be invoked with up to 200 records at a time, so they should be designed to handle multiple records. Here's an example of a bulkified trigger:

Common Pitfalls and Solutions

While bulkification improves efficiency, developers often encounter common pitfalls:

• SOQL Queries Inside Loops: Avoid placing SOQL queries inside loops to prevent hitting query limits. Instead, query outside the loop and use collections.
• Unnecessary DML Statements: Minimize DML operations by collecting records to update and performing a single update operation.
• Incorrect Data Handling: Ensure that your logic correctly handles all records in the collection, including edge cases like empty lists.

Conclusion

Incorporating bulkification in your Apex code is crucial for building efficient, scalable Salesforce applications. By processing records in batches, you can optimize your code to work within Salesforce's governor limits and improve the overall performance of your applications. Remember to always test your bulkified code with different batch sizes to ensure it handles various scenarios effectively.