[SalesForce] Triggers Best practices

This is an issue that is faced by many, many people. There are no straight answers especially since everyone's setup and dependencies are different. I am not offering any solutions just listing some gotchas.

For data backup and restore, please note that there are some things that are not restore-able. Salesforce provides a read-only view to some tables and if you try to restore them, the write/ update will fail. So, beware of any solutions that offer full backup and restore functionality.

For metadata, it is a little bit worse. Not all the metadata is supported by the metadata API. So, you cannot backup the entire Org even if you wanted to. Additionally, the governor limits allow you to take a backup of just 5000 metadata components in one shot. So, you can never have a complete backup of your Org. You have to make N number of round trips to make a full backup, and this is true irrespective of the client you use.

After searching here and there and writing few triggers myself, I have come up with the following:

1. Follow proper naming conventions to make your code more logical and readable.
2. Write one-trigger per object.
   • Use trigger context-variables to identify specific event and performs tasks accordingly.
3. Logic-less triggers
   • Now, debugging in apex is itself serious pain, adding whole lot of logic in trigger and debugging it is... well you can guess. So, break your trigger logic in to trigger-handler classes.
4. Context-Specific Handler Methods
   • Using specific methods in your trigger-handler-class to keep your code clean and scalable.
5. Use a framework.
   • A framework! Why? It will make your code conform to the best practices, better testing, scalability and cleaner.
6. Keep the salesforce order-of-execution of events in mind (they will come in handy).
7. Understand when to use before-trigger and when to user after-trigger.
8. Write trigger logic to support bulk operations.
9. Triggers can't contain test methods. So, its unit tests must be saved in a separate file.
10. Use custom settings to turn the trigger On/Off.
    • Once deployed, any changes or making a trigger Active/Inactive, you would need to make the changes on sandbox and then push it from their using changeset or IDE. Using custom settings to make a decision on the trigger will make life easy.

Helpful links: https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Trigger_Frameworks_and_Apex_Trigger_Best_Practices http://www.iterativelogic.com/salesforce-apex-trigger-best-practices/ http://krishhari.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/an-architecture-framework-to-handle-triggers-in-the-force-com-platform

https://developer.salesforce.com/page/How_to_Write_Good_Unit_Tests https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/developer-relations/2015/01/apex-best-practices-15-apex-commandments.html https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Trigger_Frameworks_and_Apex_Trigger_Best_Practices