All About Asynchronous Apex

While studying for the Salesforce Platform Developer II certification, I was going through the different options Apex provides to run Apex code asynchronously. This post is all about sharing the study notes with key points to remember.

Apex provides four options to run code asynchronously. Future Method, Queueable Apex, Batch Apex and Scheduled Apex.

Future Methods

Methods are annotated with @future annotation.
Future methods should be static and can only return void type.
It supports parameters, but parameters should be primitive data types, arrays of primitive data types, or collection. sObjects or objects cannot be used as parameters to future methods.
These methods run in their own thread and will only start when the resources are available.
They are used for long running operations and prevent any delay in apex transaction.
They can be used for callouts to external web services and also separating DML operations to prevent Mixed DML error.
Future methods should not be used for processing large amount of data. In that case, Batch Apex should be used.
To test future methods, enclose test code between startTest and stopTest test methods.
Future methods not necessarity execute in the same order as they are called.
Future methods cannot be used inside Visualforce controllers getter, setter, constructor methods.

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Queueable Apex

Apex code must implement Queueable interace.
By implementing Queueable interface, Apex class can be added to the job queue and it will run when the system resources are available.
The difference between Queueable Apex and Future methods is –

Queueable Apex supports job-chaining
It supports non primitive data types likes sObjects or custom objects.

System.enqueueJob method is used to submit the job. After submission, ID of AsyncApexJob record is returned.
Using SOQL, status of the queued job can be monitored programmatically by querying AsyncApexJob table. The same is also possible from “Apex Jobs”in setup.
Chaining is supported here, thus allowing a job to be started from another running job.
The execution of a queued job counts once against the shared limit for Asynchronous Apex method executions.
Maximum 50 jobs can be added to the queue in a single transaction.
Only one child job can exist for each parent job.
There is no limit on the dept of the chained jobs.

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Batch Apex

Apex class must implement Database.Batchable interface, which will allow them to write code against start, execute and finish methods.
A batch class can be invoked by calling Database.executeBatch. It needs the instance of the class and batch size.
Using SOQL, status of the batch job can be monitored programmatically by querying AsyncApexJob table. The same is also possible from “Apex Jobs”in setup.
It is used to process millions of records asynchronously.
Apex jobs always get executed in a separate transaction.
Every batch apex transactions has their own governor limit(new limit always). Thus if one batch fails, it will not impact other batches.
Start Method:

It is used to collect records or objects which will be passed to the method “execute”.
It returns either a Database.QueryLocator object or an Iterable.

Execute Method:

This method is responsible for doing the actual processing work.
Default batch size is 200.
Parameter it needs – a reference to Database.BatchableContext object and a list of sObjects.

Finish Method:

This method is used to do post-processing operations likes sending email etc.

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