Apex Trigger Bulkification

Understanding Bulkification in Apex Triggers

Bulkification is a fundamental concept in Salesforce development, ensuring that your Apex triggers can handle multiple records efficiently. When a trigger is invoked, it can operate on a single record or a batch of up to 200 records. Proper bulkification ensures that your code can handle these scenarios without hitting governor limits, which are designed to ensure resource allocation in Salesforce's multi-tenant environment.

Why Bulkification Matters

In Salesforce, governor limits are enforced to prevent any single organization from monopolizing shared resources. This makes bulkification essential as it helps in:

• Reducing the number of DML statements and queries.
• Avoiding governor limits related to SOQL queries and DML operations.
• Enhancing performance and scalability of your code.

Best Practices for Bulkification

The following best practices can help you achieve effective bulkification in your triggers:

• Use collections (like lists, sets, and maps) to handle records in bulk.
• Perform DML operations outside of loops.
• Use Map to query related data in bulk.
• Avoid hardcoding Ids and instead use dynamic queries.

Example: Bulkifying an Apex Trigger

Let's take a look at a sample trigger that is bulkified. This trigger updates a custom field on the Account object whenever the related Contacts are updated.

Conclusion

Bulkification is critical for writing efficient and scalable Apex triggers. By following best practices and ensuring your triggers are designed to handle bulk operations, you can avoid hitting governor limits and improve the performance of your Salesforce applications. In the next post, we'll explore how to manage trigger logic using trigger handlers to further streamline your development process.