Salesforce DML limitation
As you are working on a Cloud solution, with an infrastructure shared with other clients, Salesforce enforces many technical limitations called Governor Limits. This way they can better manage equity between clients and also ensure a client running a heavy process will not impact the other clients – at least for a limited period of time – striving to serve the same level of ressources to each client.
All automations have different limitations and different behaviors depending on how you use their components. Here we focus on the Workflow feature that Salesforce proposes, and in particular on the Field Update option.
As a surprise, Workflow Field Updates come without impacting the DML limit, nor the SOQL one. There is no official article found as of now stating this, but it has been highlighted by Chris Baldock (Salesforce CTA) since 2018 in this excellent deck Using The Right Tool For The Job.
Let’s try it out by our self to believe it!
Set up your Workflow Field Updates and your Workflow Rule
We’ll be testing and validating this on a simple example on the Account object, and by creating one workflow field update and one workflow rule.
Create the Workflow Field Updates first
Create the Worklow Rule
Activate your Workflow Rule
Adjust the Setting of your Developer Console
Now let’s open up the Developer Console, and adjust some settings to catch the right level of logs we need.
We need to catch the level of Limits the transaction has reached, this requires to set the Profiling setting to FINE at least. You can find all the details on this official article.
Switch the Profiling Setting to FINEST to catch the LIMITS in the logs
Go to Debug -> Change Log Levels
On the General Trace Settings for You click on Add/Change
And set the Profiling dropdown value to FINEST
Trigger the Workflow Rule
While having your Developer Console still opened, let’s now create a new Account and ensure the Workflow Rule has run successfully.
Check the Logs
As you can see, no profiling information has been retrieved, meaning that no DML has been used as part of this transation!
That’s it!
If you still don’t believe, add a Trigger or Process builder with a Record Create/Update. This way you can be sure the Logs will reflect at least one DML. But still no DML associated to the Workflow rules, independently of the number of Field Update it is supporting!