How would you use Schema.SObjectField to dynamically get the values of each field for the object?

Question

Basically, we have this object: Animal. And Animal has a few fields, Number_Of_Legs, Warm_Or_Cold_Blooded, etc and I basically want to automatically map the names and corresponding values into a map.

That way, as we added more fields, we wouldn't have to update the code.

Currently, we have:

    Map <String, Schema.SObjectField> fieldMap = Animal__c.getSobjectType().getDescribe().fields.getMap();

    Map<String, Integer> animalQualities = new Map<String, Integer>();
    for(String field : fieldMap.keySet()){
        //animal passed in prior...
        animalQualities.put(field, animal.getFieldValueOf(field));
    }

animal.getFieldValueOf(field) isn't a real function, but is there something similar that already exists?

Answer 1

You're looking for getPopulatedFieldsAsMap. This gives you a Map where the key is each populated field, and the value is each value stored in the record. Unpopulated values won't be present.

Answer 2

I have in a utilities class that returns the picklist values of a field where I pass the object and the field. In this way it's one piece of code that can be reused. I think it indirectly answers your question because you can't do getfieldvalueof

public static List<SelectOption> getPicklistValues(SObject obj, String fld)
{
    List<SelectOption> options = new List<SelectOption>();

    // Get the object type of the SObject.
    Schema.sObjectType objType = obj.getSObjectType(); 
    // Describe the SObject using its object type.
    Schema.DescribeSObjectResult objDescribe = objType.getDescribe();       
    // Get a map of fields for the SObject
    Map<String, Schema.SObjectField> fieldMap = objDescribe.fields.getMap(); 
    // Get the list of picklist values for this field.
    List<Schema.PicklistEntry> values = fieldMap.get(fld).getDescribe().getPickListValues();
    
    // Add these values to the selectoption list.
    for (Schema.PicklistEntry a : values)
    { 
        options.add(new SelectOption(a.getLabel(), a.getValue())); 
    }
    return options;
}