Triggers and Helper Class

Triggers are used to capture events on any DML operation and perform custom logic implementation on that event. The Salesforce’s best coding practices suggest that we should have only one Trigger on an object and a Helper class for handling the events of trigger and methods to perform the required custom implementation. So in this article, I’ll explain how to work with the Triggers and Helper Class and use the optimal way to code and use the best coding practices.

First of all, we create only one trigger for an object and use the trigger context variables to differentiate the DML events.

Trigger events can be a comma-separated list of one or more of the following events as described in code.

Just to give an idea to newcomers, here is the list of Trigger Context Variables:

That’s all the Trigger context variables that you’ll be using in general tasks.

We capture and differentiate all the trigger events with the help of the Switch and Trigger.operationType context variable.

In those event capturing conditions we call methods of Helper class. Now we will shift over to Helper Class. The concept behind having a helper class is to have all the logic outside trigger for reusability and I use it to basically cover the code easily with Test class. As it’s easy to find a test class for a class then a test class for the trigger. Moreover, we can even create sub-methods for writing logic which can be used by other methods in the class.

We are capturing the context of the account before and after any DML operation through trigger.newMap and trigger.oldMap. It's good to use map rather than a list to capture the context of object.

Fun part:

Question for the ones who have a piece of good knowledge of Salesforce. Can we use Trigger Context variables in an apex class? If yes then how? If no then why? Do think twice before you answer.

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