Force.com Apex Code Developer's Guide

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When Should I Use Apex?

The Salesforce prebuilt applications provide powerful CRM functionality. In addition, Salesforce provides the ability to customize the prebuilt applications to fit your organization. However, your organization may have complex business processes that are unsupported by the existing functionality. When this is the case, the Force.com platform includes a number of ways for advanced administrators and developers to implement custom functionality. These include Apex, Visualforce, and the SOAP API.

Apex

Use Apex if you want to:
  • Create Web services.
  • Create email services.
  • Perform complex validation over multiple objects.
  • Create complex business processes that are not supported by workflow.
  • Create custom transactional logic (logic that occurs over the entire transaction, not just with a single record or object).
  • Attach custom logic to another operation, such as saving a record, so that it occurs whenever the operation is executed, regardless of whether it originates in the user interface, a Visualforce page, or from SOAP API.

Visualforce

Visualforce consists of a tag-based markup language that gives developers a more powerful way of building applications and customizing the Salesforce user interface. With Visualforce you can:
  • Build wizards and other multistep processes.
  • Create your own custom flow control through an application.
  • Define navigation patterns and data-specific rules for optimal, efficient application interaction.

SOAP API

Use standard SOAP API calls if you want to add functionality to a composite application that processes only one type of record at a time and does not require any transactional control (such as setting a Savepoint or rolling back changes).