Advanced Feature Management in Salesforce and why its so important

At WDCi we’ve developed a framework for advanced feature management, we call this TDTM (Table Driven Trigger Management)and it’s a solution to manage Salesforce Apex Triggers. Salesforce introduced this concept with their Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP). TDTM is new to the majority of Salesforce users, which is why you haven’t heard much chatter about it. Salesforce has not released a stand-alone package (managed or unmanaged) for customer use. With its robustness, TDTM has the ability to become more popular.

TDTM Trigger switches

If you’re new to Salesforce triggers, you can learn more here. When you have multiple triggers in a Salesforce object, the order of trigger execution is non-deterministic. With your organization’s requirements changing and growing with time, you’ll have more triggers created in-house and from installed apps. It could possibly increase your triggers on a single object. Eventually, it may introduce a risk of possible data issues due to lack of control over triggers and their execution order. When disabling existing trigger functionalities, traditional triggers need developers to adjust/comment APEX code. Therefore it could possibly be difficult to maintain traditional Salesforce triggers in an Org. Developers might have difficulty in understanding and debugging problems. These concerns have been resolved with Salesforce TDTM.

Salesforce HEDA TDTM Trigger handler configuration screen

This short video from Salesforce explains the technical behaviour of Table Driven Trigger Management.

Let’s dig into the factors that make TDTM an essential in your Salesforce Org.

More control over your code – With traditional triggers, there is no guarantee that they will run in a particular order. With trigger management, you can decide when to run which trigger code.
Admin Friendly – Salesforce Admin can enable/disable a feature without developers. Comment/un-comment trigger codes and reducing deployments cycles are not required.
Developer Friendly – It’s easy to understand, debug problems and develop new plug-in features.
Scalability – TDTM can help scale triggers into features to simplify functions.

Additional Reading:

View Technical documentation here.

Read more information about HEDA here.

Learn more about Salesforce Higher Education Data Architecture here.

Check out HEDA Github page here.

More posts on how we helped others with Triggers.