Salesforce: Instantiating an SObject Dynamically at Run-time
I’m sure a lot of you have this documented somewhere but I’ve recently discovered that it’s quite difficult to find an obvious reference to this knowledge on the interwobbles. So how would you create a Generic SObject at run-time? It’s rather easy thankfully:
String sObjectName = 'MyObject__c'; Schema.SObjectType t = Schema.getGlobalDescribe().get(sObjectName); SObject s = t.newSObject();
If you require this type of functionality quite often I’d suggest putting it in a utility class.
The Silver Lining 
Interesting post, Wes. What would be a possible use case for this? When you call Schema.getGlobalDescribe().get(SObjectName), what is returned since that object hasn’t been created yet?
~ Clint
Clint Lee
January 26, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Clint, I’ll be demonstrating that in my next post but it would assist you in fullfilling one of the core requirements of OOP, namely Polymorphism.
Wes
January 26, 2011 at 6:04 pm
Gotcha. I was thinking you were referring to creating a new Object in the org (say via metadata). Looking forward to the next post, too.
Clint Lee
January 26, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Pity you are then dead in the water when you want to do a bulk upsert as AFAIK there is no way to instantiate the correctly typed list that is required starting from the object type name…
Force 201
January 26, 2011 at 6:26 pm
Because of the Upsert on generic SObject list limitation?
Wes
January 28, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Yes; if you are creating many objects of one SObject type you want to insert a list of them rather than insert them one by one. And there is no support for something like:
List myList = List.newInstanceForType(‘Account’);
// Create multiple SObjects here
insert myList;
Force 201
February 9, 2011 at 11:18 am
I might be misunderstanding, but I’ve done that there: https://th3silverlining.com/2011/01/28/salesforce-programmatically-populating-sample-data-post-deployment/
Or am I doing something a bit different?
Note: You cannot upsert SOBject lists, but you can insert.
Wes
February 9, 2011 at 11:22 am
No its me thats wrong as this test works:
@isTest
static void test() {
Contact c = new Contact(LastName =’abc’);
Account a = new Account(Name = ‘def’);
List l = new List{c, a};
insert l;
System.assertEquals(1, [select Count() from Contact where Name = ‘abc’]);
System.assertEquals(1, [select Count() from Account where Name = ‘def’]);
System.assertEquals(0, [select Count() from Contact where Name = ‘123’]);
System.assertEquals(0, [select Count() from Account where Name = ‘456’]);
c.LastName = ‘123’;
a.Name = ‘456’;
update l;
System.assertEquals(0, [select Count() from Contact where Name = ‘abc’]);
System.assertEquals(0, [select Count() from Account where Name = ‘def’]);
System.assertEquals(1, [select Count() from Contact where Name = ‘123’]);
System.assertEquals(1, [select Count() from Account where Name = ‘456’]);
try {
upsert l;
} catch (Exception e) {
System.assertEquals(‘DML on generic List only allowed for insert, update or delete’, e.getMessage());
}
}
Not sure where I picked up m wrong understanding of this. Thanks for taking the time to comment
Force 201
February 9, 2011 at 11:57 am
When converting some code to use List<SObject> instead of e.g. List<Contact> for an insert I had to change the API version from 18.0 to 20.0 for it to work at runtime. So it appears the generic list support is a recent improvement in the API.
Force 201
February 11, 2011 at 9:23 am
Sorry I meant to post that I’d had this issue too. Glad you figured it out.
Wes
February 14, 2011 at 11:09 am
Nice catch Wes, I am sure it was not noticed by many 🙂
Abhinav Gupta
January 28, 2011 at 6:28 am
When i try to update the sobject dynamically it throws me a error saying “System.SObjectException: Field Id is not editable”. Can you please help on this:
Schema.SObjectType t = Schema.getGlobalDescribe().get(‘Account’);
SObject sObjectAccount = t.newSObject();
sObjectAccount.put(‘Id’, ‘001G000000pyDGL’);
sObjectAccount.put(‘Name’, ‘Test’);
Update sObjectAccount;
Laxman
October 8, 2012 at 8:31 am
interesting & very useful post.. 🙂
Kapil Goutam
October 12, 2012 at 6:36 am