Overview
This rule flags Custom Objects that contain an unusually high number of custom fields. While Salesforce can technically support a large volume of fields, an excessive count can significantly clutter the user interface, overwhelm users, and often indicates underlying data model issues.
Code Reviews classifies this as a Warning because it does not immediately break functionality but introduces long term challenges related to scalability, usability, and reporting within the Salesforce environment.
Why This Matters
Having too many custom fields on an object leads to several detrimental effects:
User Interface Clutter: Users can become overwhelmed by an excessive amount of data, much of which may not be relevant to their immediate tasks, hindering their ability to efficiently interact with records.
Performance Degradation: Objects with numerous fields can lead to slower page load times for record detail pages, impacting overall application performance and user experience.
Maintenance Complexity: As the number of fields grows, the object becomes significantly harder to maintain, understand, or refactor. This increases the effort and risk associated with future development or data model changes.
Platform Limit Risks: An abundance of custom fields increases the risk of hitting various Salesforce platform limits, such as the total field count per object or limitations related to field history tracking.
Data Model Inefficiency: A high field count often suggests a denormalized data model, where related information that should exist in separate, linked objects is instead stored flatly on a single object. This indicates a need to normalize the data model, for example, by creating related objects and parent-child relationships.
A cleaner, more streamlined data model improves administrative agility, enhances system performance, and provides a much better user experience.
What Triggers This Rule
This rule triggers when a Custom Object contains more custom fields than a defined maximum threshold.
How to adjust the number of custom fields that trigger the rule
Code Reviews allows you to change the parameters for the "Excessive number of Custom fields". To change the maximum number of methods that trigger this rule, you can:
Navigate to the Admin Tools from the Code Reviews homepage and select Policies.
Find the Engaging policy and click on the pencil icon next to it. This policy contains the "Excessive number of custom fields" rule.
From there, you can adjust the specific parameter for the number of Custom fields allowed before the rule is triggered.
This process lets you customize policies to align with your team's specific coding standards and avoid having an excessive amount of custom fields.
Recommended Approach
To address an excessive number of custom fields and improve your data model:
Audit Field Usage: Utilize tools like Field Trip, Salesforce Optimizer, or custom report types to understand which fields are actually being used, by whom, and how frequently. This helps identify obsolete or redundant fields.
Move or Archive Legacy Fields: Migrate rarely used, historical, or legacy fields to a backup object or an archiving strategy. This keeps your active objects lean.
Normalize Your Data Model: Split overly broad objects that try to store too many disparate pieces of information into multiple, related objects. For example, instead of 200 fields for individual survey responses on a single object, create a related "Survey Response" object where each response is a new record, not a new field. This leverages Salesforce's relational database capabilities effectively.
Use Flexible Storage (Sparingly): For very unstructured or flexible data (e.g., configurations, survey answers with many variations), consider using structured formats like JSON stored within a long text area field. This should be a last resort for data that doesn't fit a relational model, as it complicates reporting and direct automation.
Consult End Users: Engage with end-users to understand their actual data needs and workflows. This can help identify irrelevant fields and guide decisions on data model restructuring.
Summary
An excessive number of custom fields can transform powerful Salesforce objects into significant maintenance challenges. A clean, well-structured data model is fundamental for ease of development, seamless integrations, efficient reporting, and a positive user experience. Code Reviews flags objects with too many fields as a Warning to encourage thoughtful data design and promote long-term success and scalability of your Salesforce implementation.