Salesforce Apex Triggers: Using them to generate auto-numbers for Records
What’s an auto-number?
An Auto-number’s a standard Salesforce type comprised of unique alphanumeric characters, that set in every time a new Record gets inserted.
Using auto-numbers makes sense.
- Users, as well as automated processes, can infer Record Types without inspecting each Record from within.
- Apart from other details, these too can be referenced to pull up Records and aid faster discovery for a larger batch of Records.
- You can avoid name conflicts for individual Records with similar names, especially to avoid high stakes queueing errors.
- Users can preserve insert sequences without even trying, or even go as far as to use these as proxies for time-of-insert.
Code Illustration
For our part, we’ve implemented an Apex trigger that runs whenever new Records are inserted to check criteria and, in turn, calls a Handler Class(as is best practice) to make updates to assign the Record an Auto-number based on the Record Type inserted.
Take the case of a walk-in-interview drive inviting both developers and testing/quality professionals.
Also, these are auto-generated upon Record Creation within a Text Field that throws up an error on attempting manual entry as depicted below.
Finally, we get finished Record Details (, or more precisely, Job Details) that were auto-generated for each Record, or Job Type.
Now that you’ve seen Auto-numbers fairly closely, we give you our source code to dive into, like always.
Source Code
Triggeronjob
Triggeronjobhandler
Summary
In the above the sections above, we went over the fundamentals of assigning Auto-numbers based on Record types through an Apex Trigger.
We hope this demonstrates the use of Auto-numbers for your own Record search and discovery processes.
For more information on process enhancements for search, sensible automation, and auto-generation best practices, reach out to us at sales@hicstwebackup.yoursalesforcedeveloper.com
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