Field Updates in Workflows

Question

I have a workflow that has three field updates. I would like to know if these occur in sequential order. If I can guarantee they do occur in the order I have set out I can accomplish my use case without a trigger.

Answer 1

The field updates occur "simultaneously", and therefore you cannot predict the behavior of the updates. Also, workflow rules are evaluated "simultaneously", meaning that one field update won't necessarily be visible to other rules, but you can choose to "re-evaluate workflow rules" to chain them together (up to 5 times).

Specifically, Salesforce follows logic similar to the following pseudo code:

set retrycount to 0
do
   if retrycount equals 5
       report error
       abort transaction
   end if
   set retry flag to false
   for each rule
       if rule is true
           add to execution list
       end if
   end for
   for each rule in execution list
       for each action
           if reevaluate flag is true
               set retry flag to true
           end if
           execute action
       end for
   end for
   increment retrycount
while retry flag is true

Note that Salesforce may not internally operate verbatim, but this "code" is meant to be illustrative of how you can expect workflow rules to behave.