My Approach to Prevent Trigger Recursion (Without Losing My Mind)

If you've been a Salesforce developer for long enough, you've probably met the silent killer of many orgs, trigger recursion.

You update a record → it fires another trigger → that update fires again → and before you know it, you've got a full-blown infinite loop. 😅

In my early projects, I used quick fixes like static booleans or flags:

if (runOnce) return;
runOnce = true;

It worked… until it didn't. Debugging became painful, especially when multiple triggers or integrations were involved.

Then I found a cleaner pattern, a centralized recursion manager, reusable across all triggers:

public class TriggerContext {
  private static Set<String> executed = new Set<String>();
  public static Boolean isFirstRun(String key) {
    return executed.add(key);
  }
}

Now, inside any trigger, I just use:

if (!TriggerContext.isFirstRun('Account_BeforeUpdate')) return;

• ✅ No global flags
• ✅ No spaghetti logic
• ✅ Simple, readable, and scalable

When I combine this with Custom Metadata / Custom Settings for trigger control (to enable or disable specific logic dynamically), I get complete control over automation.

👉 The best part: Admins and developers can work safely in parallel — no accidental recursion, no broken data integrity, and definitely no overnight or weekend debugging sessions.

If your org is struggling with unpredictable trigger behavior, give this pattern a shot. You can thank me later. 😄