Salesforce Apex SOQL: Retrieving Parent-to-Child Records (Account to Opportunities) with Step-by-Step Explanation

Salesforce provides a powerful querying language known as SOQL (Salesforce Object Query Language) to retrieve data stored within the platform. One common use case is fetching data from a parent object and its related child records. For instance, you might want to retrieve all Accounts and their associated Opportunities. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through how to achieve this using SOQL in Apex.

Understanding the Relationship

Before diving into the code, it’s essential to understand the relationship between the Account and Opportunity objects:

• Account: The parent object in this scenario.
• Opportunity: The child object, with a lookup relationship to Account.

Each Opportunity is related to an Account via the AccountId field, forming a one-to-many relationship where an Account can have multiple Opportunities.

Step 1: Basic SOQL Query for Parent Object

Let’s start by writing a simple SOQL query to retrieve data from the Account object:

List accounts = [SELECT Id, Name FROM Account];

This query fetches the Id and Name fields of all Account records.

Step 2: Retrieving Child Records Using a Subquery

To retrieve the related Opportunity records for each Account, you can use a nested SOQL query. This is known as a parent-to-child query. The syntax involves using a subquery that fetches child records and is enclosed in parentheses.

List accountsWithOpps = [SELECT Id, Name, (SELECT Id, Name FROM Opportunities) FROM Account];

In this query:

• (SELECT Id, Name FROM Opportunities) is the subquery that fetches Opportunity records related to each Account.
• Opportunities is the relationship name that represents the child relationship from Account to Opportunity.

Step 3: Understanding the Query Results

The query returns a list of Account records, and each Account record contains a list of related Opportunity records. You can access these child records using Apex code:

for (Account acc : accountsWithOpps) {
System.debug(‘Account Name: ‘ + acc.Name);
for (Opportunity opp : acc.Opportunities) {
System.debug(‘Opportunity Name: ‘ + opp.Name);
}

}

In this loop:

You can then iterate over this list to access each Opportunity record.

acc.Opportunities gives you the list of Opportunity records associated with each Account.

Using SOQL in Apex to perform parent-to-child queries allows you to efficiently retrieve and process related records in Salesforce.

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