When Should You Build Solutions Declaratively Instead Of With Code in Salesforce?

Hi Prachi,

As Salesforce developers we should not always dive straight into coding just because we can. Salesforce offers a rich set of declarative development features and before implementing customizations or new functionality, we should always make sure that we are familiar and keep up to date with Salesforce’s native capabilities and that we have exhausted all native options before we start to code and reinvent the wheel.

Using native functionality or declarative development features has many benefits from time and cost savings to easier maintenance and sometimes better usability.Of course not everything can be built without coding, and there is a time and plenty of places when writing code is the right approach to build something. Make yourself aware of the native and declarative-development features in Salesforce before you code, and evaluate them in your design before you consider coding.

Here are some use cases and examples for functionality that can easily be build declaratively, without writing a single line of code:

Instead of writing Triggers, we can automate Field Updates using Workflow – automatically populating a field with a default value or updating a field based on the value of another field is a pretty common requirement. Workflow can address the basic use cases just as well as writing an Apex Trigger.