Apex Developer Guide

Apex Developer Guide
Getting Started with Apex
Writing Apex
Running Apex
Debugging, Testing, and Deploying Apex
Debugging Apex
Testing Apex
Understanding Testing in Apex
What to Test in Apex
What Are Apex Unit Tests?
Understanding Test Data
Run Unit Test Methods
Using the runAs Method
Using Limits, startTest, and stopTest
Adding SOSL Queries to Unit Tests
Testing Best Practices
Testing Example
Testing and Code Coverage
Code Coverage Best Practices
Build a Mocking Framework with the Stub API
Deploying Apex
Distributing Apex Using Managed Packages
Apex Reference
Appendices
Glossary
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Using the runAs Method

Generally, all Apex code runs in system mode, where the permissions and record sharing of the current user aren’t taken into account. The system method runAs enables you to write test methods that change the user context to an existing user or a new user so that the user’s record sharing is enforced. The runAs method doesn’t enforce user permissions or field-level permissions, only record sharing.

The user's sharing permissions are enforced within a runAs block, regardless of the sharing mode of the test class. If a user-defined method is called in the runAs block, the sharing mode enforced is that of the class where the method is defined.

Note

You can use runAs only in test methods. The original system context is started again after all runAs test methods complete.

The runAs method ignores user license limits. You can create new users with runAs even if your organization has no additional user licenses.

Every call to runAs counts against the total number of DML statements issued in the process.

Note

In the following example, a new test user is created, then code is run as that user, with that user's record sharing access:

You can nest more than one runAs method. For example:

Other Uses of runAs

You can also use the runAs method to perform mixed DML operations in your test by enclosing the DML operations within the runAs block. In this way, you bypass the mixed DML error that is otherwise returned when inserting or updating setup objects together with other sObjects. See sObjects That Cannot Be Used Together in DML Operations.

There’s another overload of the runAs method (runAs(System.Version)) that takes a package version as an argument. This method causes the code of a specific version of a managed package to be used. For information on using the runAs method and specifying a package version context, see Testing Behavior in Package Versions.