Code Smell Leads To Improved Interprocess Communications

My Auntie Pat Tern said she always knows when her teenage kids have guests over and her friend wondered how.  Is it the noise, the mess, the smell? "No," said Auntie Pat Tern, "I just ask them and they tell me."  So I thought I would look through the code in my org and pass this straight-forward idea for communication on to my developers.

When code review uncovers a lot of small problems, this can often bring larger problems to the surface. "Code Smell" refers to small problems that may reveal bigger concerns in code. I previously gave an example of code that uses a 'poltergeist' object to pass data from an external system into a custom Salesforce object before creating the data in the required Salesforce object.  The same code also uses 'hard coded' values that are not named constants.  And that "Code Smell" reveals the use of a database field for interprocess communications, setting a field value to 'success' when the record is created rather than relying on more direct means of communication.


Using the Apex Database class, as shown in the second code block, provides a direct means of communication that would make Auntie Pat Tern proud.