In the last How To Salesforce, we covered what to do when SOQL ignores null checks on required lookup fields.

In today’s post, we are going to cover a few key points when working with Future Methods. But before we do, let’s talk about what a Future Apex is. Future Apex is used to run processes in a separate thread, at a later time when system resources become available.

A Future Method runs in the background asynchronously. You can call a Future Method for executing long-running operations, such as a callout to external Web Services or any operation you’d like to run in its own thread and/or on its own time.

You can also use future methods to isolate DML operations on different sObject types to prevent the mixed DML error.

Future Methods are typically used for:

• Callouts to external Web services.
• Operations you want to run in their own thread
• Isolating DML operations on different sObject types to prevent the mixed DML error.

To define a future method, simply annotate it with the future annotation, as follows:

global class FutureClass

{

@future

public static void myFutureMethod()

{

// Perform some operations

}

}

Important points to be remembered:

1. Methods with the future annotation must be static methods, and can only return a void type.
2. The specified parameters must be primitive data types, arrays of primitive data types, or collections of primitive data types.
3. Methods with future annotation cannot take sObjects or objects as arguments.
4. We can’t call a future method from the future method.