Use JSON serialization to get around parameter limitations for future methods?

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Future methods can only take primitives or collections of primitives as parameters. To get around this you could serialize Sobjects (or classes) to a string and then deserialize them in the future method. Ex:

@future
public static void test(string foo)
{
    Contact con = json.deserialize(foo);
}

test(JSON.serialize(mycontact));

This seems to work but I’m wondering if anyone knows of any drawbacks or pitfalls to this approach?

Answer

A few thoughts:

  • If you are dealing with a collection the string resulting from JSON serialization could become prohibitively large. This could result in heap size limit issues during deserialization.
  • The data in the sObject may be stale by the time the future method executes. Fields may have been changed on the Contact before the future method runs.
  • You may be serializing and passing data that you otherwise don’t care about. E.g. You probably wouldn’t want to serialize a blob data field.

Weather any of these are an issue or not will entirely depend on your usage.

Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Greg Grinberg , Answer Author : Daniel Ballinger

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