Value Of Object After Insert Remains The Same

Question

I've a simple conceptual doubt - Would really appreciate if someone would explain me the reason for this behaviour:

I'm inserting a new contact from console and following is the snippet:

Contact c = new Contact();
c.Email = 'TSTCONTACTJAN11TEST123@TEST.COM';
c.LastName = 'TEST';
c.CurrencyIsoCode = 'USD';
insert c;
system.debug('+++'+c.Email);

I've written a simple before insert trigger which would check if the Email is not null then would make the Email lower case and add '.com' to it.

  For(Contact c: newCon){
            if(c.Email != null){
                c.Email = c.Email.toLowerCase() + '.com';
            }
        }

So when I'm running the first snippet in developer console the debug result is TSTCONTACTJAN11TEST123@TEST.COM

Shouldn't it be tstcontactjan11test123@test.com.com since before trigger will be acting upon it?

I'm getting tstcontactjan11test123@test.com.com only when I run the following snippet along with the first snippet:

Contact newCon = [SELECT Id, Email FROM Contact Where Id = :c.Id LIMIT 1];
System.debug('+++ After Insert Email Value: '+newCon.Email);

Answer 1

When you perform DML on a record, the "in memory" instance (i.e. your c variable) of your object is not automatically updated¹.

If you re-query the record, and debug the email value, you would see "tstcontactjan11test123@test.com.com" as you expect.

If you don't re-query the record, the in-memory field values remain untouched.

As a side note, explicitly transforming the email to lower case is not necessary if you're working with an email type field (and not something like, say, a text field). Salesforce automatically makes emails all lower case (learned that one the hard way some months ago).

^{1: If you're inserting a record, after the DML completes, the in-memory instance will be updated to contain the Id (and recordTypeId too, I believe, if you have multiple recordtypes for that particular object)}