Chapter 10. Apex

Up until this point in the book, your development efforts on the Force Platform have used the highly productive, mainly declarative features of the platform. From relationships, through workflow, through tag-driven Visualforce pages, you have not had to write any code in creating the current version of the Recruiting application.

The creators of the Force Platform believe in providing robust access to the capabilities of the platform in the most efficient manner, both for development and execution. As a best practice, you should always use the declarative features to implement the functionality you require in your application, since there is no need to re-implement capabilities already provided for you.

But there are times when you have to go beyond even the broad capabilities of the declarative portion of the Force Platform. For these particular situations, the Force Platform offers Apex.

Important

If you have been following the examples in the previous chapter, your Force Platform organization should be ready for the exercises in this chapter. If you have not done the exercises, or want to start with a fresh version of the sample Recruiting application, please refer to the instructions in the Code Share project for this book. You can find information on how to access that project in Chapter 1: Welcome to the Force Platform. In addition, the project contains instructions on how to update your organization with changes required for this chapter.