This seriously is one of the biggest thorns in my side. SFDC does not allow you to use complex objects or collections of objects as parameters to a future call. What is the best workaround for this?
Currently what I have done is passed in multiple parallel arrays of primitives which form a complete object based on the index. Meaning if I need to pass a collections of users, I may pass 3 string arrays, say – Name[], Id[], and Role[]. Name[0], Id[0]. and Role[0] are the first user, etc. This means I have to build all these arrays and build the future method to reconstruct the relevant objects on the other end as well.
Is there a better way to do this?
As to why, once an Apex “transaction” is complete, the VM is destroyed. And generally speaking, salesforce will not serialize your object graph for resuming at a future time.
There may be a better way to get this task done. Can the future method query for the objects it needs to act on? Perhaps you can pass the List of Ids and the future method can use this in a WHERE clause. If it’s a large number of objects, batch apex may be useful to avoid governor limits.