If you are building ISV packages on Force.com, you quickly end up needing to do Describe calls on sObjects. Prior to Winter 14, you could either request the Describe results for a single sObject, or get the describe results for all sObjects. Most people then end up writing utility classes to cache those results into a static Map so you could retrieve the results from a Map as you needed them, and not breach any describe call limits.

But in Winter 14, there is a new Schema Method which let’s you pass in a string [] of sObjects names you want describe results for, and get back an Schema.DescribeSobjectResult [] for the results, which will prove really helpful when you need the results for two or three sObjects and a full describe seems like overkill. As ever with new Force.com releases, I also now get to go back and update all those utility classes I built/borrowed from others…

Here’s the sample code from the docs

// sObject types to describe
String[] types = new String[]{'Account','Merchandise__c'};
// Make the describe call
Schema.DescribeSobjectResult[] results = Schema.describeSObjects(types);
System.debug('Got describe information for ' + results.size() + ' sObjects.');
// For each returned result, get some info
for(Schema.DescribeSobjectResult res : results) {
System.debug('sObject Label: ' + res.getLabel());
System.debug('Number of fields: ' + res.fields.getMap().size());
System.debug(res.isCustom() ? 'This is a custom object.' : 'This is a standard object.');
// Get child relationships
Schema.ChildRelationship[] rels = res.getChildRelationships();
if (rels.size() > 0) {
System.debug(res.getName() + ' has ' + rels.size() + ' child relationships.');
}
}