10 Must-Know Salesforce Apex Interview Questions with Real-Time Use Cases

In this day and age, with companies depending on cloud servers like Salesforce, Apex is one of the must-have skills to have. Even big companies hire a person who can customize and resolve real-time issues that occur in their Salesforce platform. If you are planning to pursue a career as an Apex developer, you must know how to answer scenario-based questions in interviews. 

Interviewers these days want candidates who can work effectively in real-world scenarios and contribute to their projects and teams. If you are going to appear for an Apex Interview, then you must be thinking about how to manage such scenario-based Salesforce Apex interview questions. Here are the top 10 Scenario-Based Apex Interview Questions that evaluate your practical Apex problem-solving in work or in the real world.

Q1. How can you implement multi-step approval automation with Apex?

A. I would build multi-step approval automation by programming in Apex to submit records for approval automatically based on some criteria. So, for example, if an Opportunity is over $50K, I could have an approval chain that sends it first to the manager and then to finance. I would check the result of each approval step and based on predefined (custom) logic start next approver dynamically. This method provides much more flexibility than is available in standard approval processes, especially for complex conditional approval chains.

Q2. How can Apex be used to implement scheduled data archival?

A. To implement schedule data archival, Scheduled Apex is used. Through this, a class can be written without needing manual intervention. After this Apex Scheduler helps in scheduling to run at regular intervals. 

Q3. How would you prevent duplicate records during bulk insert using Apex?

A. To keep things unique and avoid duplicates, I'll use a Set or Map to track unique identifiers prior to doing any DML. For instance, when inserting Account records using Data Loader or Apex, I will keep Account Names in a Set and check against them for duplicates before adding new records. In case a record is already present, I will skip the DML on that record, it helps in better data integrity and smooth processing.

Q4. How would you handle a cross-object calculation in Apex that updates multiple parent objects?

A. I’d use aggregate SOQL queries to get related child records, e.g. I would then calculate what I needed (e.G. the total Opportunity amount) and update the parent Account with the new totals. I would make sure the code is bulk-safe and process the records in batches to avoid hitting governor limits and to efficiently handle a large number of related records.

Q5. How can Apex help in handling record locking issues?

A. To deal with record locking problems, I would rely on the FOR UPDATE clause in my SOQLs. For example - two users are trying update the same record of Inventory at the same time, SELECT ... FOR UPDATE will lock the record for the first user’s transaction. That second user can’t make any changes until the first transaction is done, and that guarantees data consistency and prevents any race conditions.

Q6. How can you implement dynamic approval chains in Apex based on external data?

A. I would just pull the approval hierarchy dynamically from Custom Metadata or an external system. For instance, if the approval process varies by country or department, I could develop Apex that dynamically retrieves the approval hierarchy by those parameters and sends records for approval. That means the approval sequence can be modified automatically by external data, and so it’s more flexible than fixed approval rules.

Q7. How do you handle callouts from triggers without hitting limits?

A. Because triggers run synchronously, I would never call out from them directly, as they would quickly hit governor limits. future methods or Queueable Apex is what I would go for. This job runs in the background, making the callout outside the trigger’s synchronous context, thus not counting against the governor limits for synchronous transactions. 

Q8. How would you implement field-level security checks dynamically in Apex?

A. To implement dynamic field-level security in Apex, utilize Schema.sObjectType and getDescribe() to check a field's permissions through methods like isAccessible() and isUpdateable(). This ensures that code honors user security before reading or writing any field.

Q9. How can you combine Batch Apex and Queueable Apex for complex processing?

A. I would use Batch Apex for the bulk processing for large data that needs to be processed in multiple steps, and then chain Queueable Apex jobs for follow-up processing. I might batch apex through a million records, and when that batch is done, i’d enqueue a Queueable job to send notifications or do more processing. This will allow this process to sequentially execute each step with a distributed load.

Q10. What’s the Apex approach for real-time data deduplication during import?

A. While importing the data, I would maintain a Map of unique identifiers like email or external ID , while iterating through the records. For example, while I am importing Contacts, I store email addresses in a Map and then see if the incoming email is already there. When I find a duplicate, I skip the DML on that record to prevent duplicates from getting created in the system on real time.