[SalesForce] Must Lightning Data Service always respect running user’s object/field access

After doing some testing, I can say that this is very inefficient. Loading more than about 6 records caused a separate loading to occur. While the system did not crash, as I hypothesized originally in my comment, the total loading time was incredibly large. For about 800 records, it took over 20 seconds to load, about 40 records per second. And this was for a field specified by the fields attribute. This is opposed to my PagingSortingDemo, which loads about 52,770 records with 4 fields in three seconds, or about 17,500 records per second, a total increase in speed of about 43,900%.

The moral of the story is that you should only use Lightning Data Service to load one record at a time. Similarly, if you're going to choose to save data, make a list and save them all at once. Lightning Data Service is ideal for things like Quick Actions that update or query the related record (and with even better performance when using the cache). It is not ideal for bulk loading or saving of data.

Hopefully, they'll introduce a bulk-friendly option for both loading and saving data in the future. For now, you should prefer to use Apex Code whenever you need to upload more than a few records at a time.

I haven't used LDS yet to replace Apex code, or for inserting/updating records. But an incredibly useful ability I found is using LDS to monitor for updates to records and then acting upon that update.

For example, I have one component that presents multiple records in kanban type view. I use an aura:iteration to create an LDS instance for each record, with a handler for updates.

If the user makes an update to any of those records anywhere in the app, even if it's using standard built-in functionality (such as an update record screen somewhere else), my component can detect those updates via LDS and refresh itself.

Using this approach, I was able to do away with things like firing events from all other customer components when records were updated, or trying to catch force:refreshView events if a standard component made an update (which never worked very well).

This is an ability in LDS that cannot be reproduced using Apex code. Even though trigger code might run when records are updated, there's no way for them to tell a component that the update occurred unless you publish a Platform Event as part of trigger execution, and the component listens for the Platform Event. I find LDS to be simpler right now than trying to wire up Platform Events, even though LDS's scope of listening to updates is only within the same user's app, and Platform Events could be more global.

Anyway, hope this info helps.