Question

I have some custom fields on my User object that I want to access with APEX code in my VisualForce trigger. When I access it from a Formula field I get to use a nifty $User reference like this:

$User.my_prop__c

From APEX I have to query the User object by UserId like this:

[select my_prop__c from User where id = :UserInfo.getUserId()].my_prop__c;

Is there something baked into APEX already that would let me get at the user properties without the SOQL query? If not, does anyone know of a utility class for lazy loading and caching user properties so the overhead is minimal.

Answer 1

I would use something similar to the following code sample. It uses a singleton pattern to statically store the information in memory for the duration of your transaction. It’s similar to the lazy loading that twamley proposed but I feel this is a much simpler approach.

Usage 1: UserUtil.CurrentUser.Email;

Usage 2: User someUser = UserUtil.getUser(someUserId);

This will allow you to access the same information on the current user or other users in the system. Notice the queryUsers method just returns a query result. This makes it easy to add and remove fields from your query as it is isolated in its own method keeping things simple.

Note: that this code pulls in all users when used. Most orgs do not have multiple hundreds of users so heap size shouldn’t be a concern. But if it is you can just modify the queryUsers() method to only return active users or filter down based on other criteria.

public class UserUtil {
//Protected Members
private static final UserUtil instance = new UserUtil();
private Map<Id, User> mapUsers;

//Properties
public static User CurrentUser {
    get { return getUser(UserInfo.getUserId()); }
}

//Constructor
private UserUtil() {
    mapUsers = new Map<Id, User>(queryUsers());
}

//Public Methods
public static User getUser(Id userId) {
    if (instance.mapUsers.containsKey(userId)) {
        return instance.mapUsers.get(userId);
    }
    else {
        throw new InvalidUserIdException('Unable to locate user id: ' + userId);
    }
}

//Private Methods
private List<User> queryUsers() {
    return [SELECT 
                Id
                , Name
                , UserName
                , Email
                , Alias 
            FROM 
                User];
}

//Internal Classes
public class InvalidUserIdException extends Exception {}

}