Salesforce Platform Developer I Certification Guide

@future

You saw this earlier during the chapter about the annotations. The @future annotation means that the code in the method will run asynchronously (when Salesforce resources are available). So, it can be 10 seconds later, but also for 2 minutes. This functionality will typically be used during callouts to external web services (@future(callout=true)).

The @future functionality has the following limits:

• It is always a public and static method.
• It returns only a void type.
• If you want to provide extra parameters to the method, the parameters need to be primitive data types or collections of primitive data types. This means you cannot provide a list with accounts to the @future method.
• You cannot call another @future method in your future ...