Salesforce Record IDs: the Id Type
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Explain what an Id represents in Apex
- Declare a variable of type Id
- Distinguish the Id type from a plain String that happens to look like an ID
Prerequisites: "Date, Time, and Datetime"
Why Id gets its own type
Id accountId = '001XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX';An Id looks like a String, but Apex treats it specially — if you assign a value that isn't a validly-formatted Salesforce ID, Apex throws an error immediately, rather than letting a malformed ID silently cause problems in a query later.
A real business example: Manufacturing
Id productionBatchId = someRecord.Id;Any time you're holding onto "which specific record is this," an Id is the right type — whether it's a batch, an account, or a custom object record. You'll use this constantly starting in Module "DML: Changing Data Safely," where inserting a record gives you back its new Id.
Common mistakes
- Using String instead of Id "because it\'s simpler." This throws away Salesforce's automatic format validation for no real benefit — prefer
Idwhenever a value genuinely represents a record identifier.
Exercise
Declare an Id variable called sampleId and assign it any validly-formatted 18-character Salesforce ID string, like '001000000000001AAA'. Debug it.
Show hint
Standard Salesforce IDs are 15 or 18 characters, starting with a 3-character object-type prefix (001 for Account, for example).
Salesforce Record IDs: the Id Type Quiz
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Summary
Every Salesforce record has a unique identifier, and Apex has a dedicated Id type for it — distinct from String, even though an Id looks like text, because Salesforce validates its format automatically.