SOQL is Salesforce’s object query language. It has familiar basic syntax to traditional database SQL syntax but with some noticeable differences. One of the biggest differences is that SOQL does not support wildcard in SELECT statements to query all fields from an object. For example, “SELECT * FROM object”. However, there is a workaround by using Dynamic SOQL and Apex Describe.
In the below example I show you how to query all fields from an object by exploiting the metadata available from the DescribeSObjectResult class.
Example 1: Query All Fields for a Known Record ID
Example 2: Query All Fields for All Records
The same concept as above but we don’t have a specific record ID, so we need to determine the sobjectype by explicitly specifying the object we’ll query on.
Next Steps
In addition to the resources linked above, check out these great tutorials to continue learning more about SOQL!
I tried these queries, but errors indicate that List syntax requires the sObjectType like so:
// without an ID, simply specify the object to then derive the sobject type
DescribeSObjectResult describeResult = Account.getSObjectType().getDescribe();
List fieldNames = new List( describeResult.fields.getMap().keySet() );
String query =
‘ SELECT ‘ +
String.join( fieldNames, ‘,’ ) +
‘ FROM ‘ +
describeResult.getName()
;
// return generic list of sobjects or typecast to expected type
List records = Database.query( query );
System.debug( records );
Event then I get an error I’m not sure how to fix:
line 3, col 28. Invalid initial value type Set for List
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Hi Tim,
Sorry about that, it seems my blog has stripped out the < and > characters thinking they were HTML tags and not code. Doh!
Will get that fixed shortly.
Thanks,
Doug
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Nice. Thanks!
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Hey Doug this is awesome was wondering does this only pull back so many custom fields? I ran this in anonymous apex and only received a few of my custom fields.
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Hi Bryant, glad you like it!
I’m not aware of any field limitations. Confirm that your user has read access to each field. Developer Console uses the Tooling REST API to execute Apex and respects sharing and access.
Thanks,
Doug
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Thanks for the great code Doug!! Saved me a bunch of time.
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Thanks for the kind feedback, Jeff!
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thanks Doug, It worked wonderfully.
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