“End of Apex Triggers Era” – Salesforce

In one of the most unexpected announcements, Salesforce has declared that it is the end of the road for Apex Triggers.  In this unexpected statement, Salesforce said there are better alternatives for Apex Triggers like the out-of-the-box aka point-and-click features of Salesforce and they see no point in continuing with Apex triggers.  They added features to the Process Builder tool to cover the gaps created by the unavailability of Apex Triggers.

“We are ending the Apex Triggers feature in Salesforce.  It may be surprising to most of you but its been long coming for us especially with the advent of Process Builder.  Its the end of Apex Triggers Era.  This is in align with our core strategy to make most of the platform features work via point-and-click”, said Director of Product Manager, Salesforce.

Those in the Salesforce ecosystem may not be surprised by this Salesforce announcement as they are already aware of Salesforce’s knack of doing such things like how Salesforce unexpectedly announced earlier this year the release of “Lightning Web Components”, an alternative to their core Aura components (previously referred to as Lightning components).  But this announcement on Apex Triggers would take some time to digest for everyone.

What’s new in Process Builder?

According to Salesforce, Process Builder could handle most of the Apex Triggers features except for a couple of them.  So, they brought in those extra features into Process Builder and ended the Apex Triggers era.  The biggest feature they now brought into Process Builder from Apex Triggers is the ability to start a Process on ‘record deletion’. Wow!  Earlier any process in PB would run on a record creation or record updates.  Now, it can run on deletion too.  I don’t have the complete details of what else is included in Process Builder (surely, we need Undelete trigger point too) yet but Salesforce mentioned Process Builder will do everything an Apex Trigger can do.  Let’s wait and watch.

What happens to all the existing Apex Triggers?

You don’t need to worry, all Apex Triggers will continue to run and work as usual.  Only the ability to create new Apex Triggers is being stopped now.  That relieves some faint hearts (like me).  Just like the Classic UI still continues to exist even with Lightning Experience is here, the Apex Triggers just continue to exist but in the background.

Summary

Adieu Apex Triggers!  End of Apex Triggers is rather a sad thing to digest.  Every Salesforce developer’s career has started with writing an Apex Trigger.  Every Salesforce Admin who switched to learning coding started with writing an Apex Trigger.  Every non-Salesforce technical person who jumped to Salesforce started with writing an Apex trigger.  Adieu Apex Triggers!  Adieu!

Btw, it is always good to see the date on which an article is released too.  Happy 1st of April.  May this year be full of fun and surprises.