Skip to content

Lesson 2 of 4 · 18 min

Reading Apex before writing it

A trigger someone else wrote, read line by line. You know more of this than you think.

Course content · 4 lessons
  1. Why this Flow should be code 14 min
  2. Reading Apex before writing it 18 min
  3. Your first trigger, in a scratch org 21 min
  4. Collections — the part that is genuinely new 19 min

You already read formulas, Flow expressions and report filters. Apex is the same skill with more punctuation. In this lesson we read a real production trigger — thirty lines — and translate every line into the Flow concept you already know.

The mapping that carries you

You know Apex calls it
Record collections List<Account>
A Get Records element a SOQL query
A Decision element if / else
A Loop element for
Assignment =
The $Record variable Trigger.new

That table is roughly sixty percent of every trigger you will ever read. The rest is the ceremony around it — class declarations, braces, semicolons — which looks like the hard part and is actually the boring part.

Homework

Open any trigger in your org (Setup → Apex Triggers) and annotate five lines using the table. Do not worry about the lines you cannot map yet; two of them are next lesson’s subject.

to move to open esc to close Full search