Chapter 2. Apex Limits

When you stay at a friend's house, you behave a little differently than when you're at home. You wipe your shoes before you enter, you don't put your feet on the coffee table, and you even use a coaster for your drink. The same holds true for the Salesforce1 Platform. While you might be paying rent, your code isn't running on your own server, so you have to follow the house rules. In Apex, these rules are referred to as the governor limits and they dictate what your code can and can't do when executed.

It doesn't make sense to write a whole chapter on Apex governor limits. Salesforce releases three major upgrades a year. These upgrades typically include classes and methods that correspond to the various new features available in the Salesforce GUI. Sometimes though, they also include a reduction in the Apex governor limits. In fact, this happens often enough that documenting the limits today would most likely render this chapter obsolete within a year from when we wrote it. This puts us in a tricky situation. If we don't write about the limits, we're ignoring a huge aspect of Apex, but if we do write about them, we're giving this book a short shelf life. Instead, we compromised and decided to discuss the concepts of the limits, how they affect us, and how we get around them. We have not discussed the specific quantities except for the ones used in examples. Only time will tell how we have fared.