Determine Plant Type with Metadata

In this blog post, we’ll explore how to use Custom Metadata in Salesforce to determine if a plant is an Indoor or Outdoor plant. This is a great real-world use case to understand how to query metadata types from Apex, especially if you’re just starting to explore Salesforce’s advanced configuration capabilities.

We’ll write a method that takes the name of a plant as input and returns whether the plant is indoor, outdoor, or if the type is not specified.

Let’s dig in! 🌿

🧠 What Are We Trying to Do?

Imagine you’re building a gardening app or a nursery management system. You have a list of plants stored in Salesforce, and each plant has a type: Indoor or Outdoor.

But instead of storing this info in a custom object, you’ve used Custom Metadata — specifically, a metadata type called Plant_Information_Master__mdt.

We want to:

• Accept a plant’s name as input.

• Query the corresponding record from the metadata.

• Return the Plant Type if it exists.

• Return a default message like “Not Specified” if the plant isn’t found.

🔍 Code Explanation

public with sharing class ApexUseCaseTen {
    
    public static String checkPlantType(String plantName){ 
        String plantType = 'Not Specified';

We start with a class called ApexUseCaseTen. Inside it, we define a static method checkPlantType, which takes the plant name as input. We initialize the return variable plantType to 'Not Specified' as the default.

        List<Plant_Information_Master__mdt> plantRecords = [SELECT Id, MasterLabel, Plant_Type__c 
                                                            FROM Plant_Information_Master__mdt 
                                                            WHERE MasterLabel = :plantName 
                                                            LIMIT 1];

We run a SOQL query on the custom metadata. We look for a record where the MasterLabel (the metadata name) matches the input plantName.

✅ Tip: MasterLabel is the display name of the metadata record, often used for lookups like this.

        if(plantRecords.size() == 1){
            return plantRecords[0].Plant_Type__c;
        }

If exactly one matching record is found, we return its Plant_Type__c field — which stores whether the plant is Indoor or Outdoor.

        return plantType;
    }
}

If no matching record is found, we return the default value: 'Not Specified'.

✅ Why This Is Useful

This method is powerful because:

• It lets you manage logic through metadata instead of hardcoding values.

• You can add or update plant types without touching Apex code.

• It shows how Apex and Custom Metadata can work together for dynamic logic.

This is a clean, scalable approach for any kind of category mapping not just plants!

🧾 Final Code Snippet

public with sharing class ApexUseCaseTen {
    public static String checkPlantType(String plantName){ 
        String plantType = 'Not Specified';
        List<Plant_Information_Master__mdt> plantRecords = [SELECT Id, MasterLabel, Plant_Type__c 
                                                            FROM Plant_Information_Master__mdt 
                                                            WHERE MasterLabel = :plantName 
                                                            LIMIT 1];
        if(plantRecords.size() == 1){
            return plantRecords[0].Plant_Type__c;
        }
        return plantType;
    }
}

🎥 Watch It in Action!

Want to see this method in action inside Salesforce? Here’s a short video where I demo how to set up metadata records and use this Apex code to read from them.