Find Recent Account and Contact Records

Sometimes you need to quickly grab the most recently created Accounts and Contacts in Salesforce maybe to display in a dashboard, audit new entries, or just for testing and debugging.

In this blog post, we’ll walk through a simple Apex method that:

• Queries the 10 most recent Account records

• Queries the 10 most recent Contact records

• Combines them into a single list

• Returns the combined result to be used elsewhere in your code

This is a great example of using SOQL, collections, and basic logic to manipulate data in Apex.

🧠 What Are We Trying to Do?

Let’s break it down:

We want to create a method that:

• Grabs the top 10 Accounts (based on CreatedDate)

• Grabs the top 10 Contacts

• Combines both sets into a list

• Returns that list

This can help in many use cases:

• Admin dashboards

• Custom Visualforce or LWC components

• Simple monitoring or audits

🔍 Code Explanation

public with sharing class ApexUseCaseEighteen {
    
    public static List<Object> displayAccAndConRecords(){
        List<Object> objList = new List<Object>();

We define a class called ApexUseCaseEighteen, and create a static method called displayAccAndConRecords which returns a list of generic Object type because we’re combining different SObject types (Accounts and Contacts).

        List<Account> accsCreated = [SELECT Id, Name FROM Account ORDER BY CreatedDate DESC LIMIT 10];
        List<Contact> conCreated = [SELECT Id, Name FROM Contact ORDER BY CreatedDate DESC LIMIT 10];

We use SOQL to fetch the 10 most recently created Account and Contact records, sorted in descending order (most recent first).

        if(accsCreated.size() > 0){
            objList.addAll(accsCreated);
        }
        if(conCreated.size() > 0){
            objList.addAll(conCreated);
        }

We check if either list has data, and if so, we add all their entries into our final objList.

        System.debug(objList.size());
        return objList;
    }
}

We print the total number of records fetched (for debugging), and then return the combined list.

✅ Why This Is Useful

This code is handy for:

• Showing new records in the last 24 hours

• Combining results from multiple objects

• Building audit tools or dashboards

Bonus Tip 💡:
If you only want records created in the last 24 hours, you can filter using SOQL date functions like:

WHERE CreatedDate = LAST_N_DAYS:1

Update your queries like so:

[SELECT Id, Name FROM Account WHERE CreatedDate = LAST_N_DAYS:1 ORDER BY CreatedDate DESC LIMIT 10];

This ensures only records from the last 24 hours are fetched!

🧾 Final Code Snippet

public with sharing class ApexUseCaseEighteen {
    public static List<Object> displayAccAndConRecords(){
        List<Object> objList = new List<Object>();

        List<Account> accsCreated = [SELECT Id, Name FROM Account WHERE CreatedDate = LAST_N_DAYS:1 ORDER BY CreatedDate DESC LIMIT 10];
        List<Contact> conCreated = [SELECT Id, Name FROM Contact WHERE CreatedDate = LAST_N_DAYS:1 ORDER BY CreatedDate DESC LIMIT 10];
        
        if(accsCreated.size() > 0){
            objList.addAll(accsCreated);
        }
        if(conCreated.size() > 0){
            objList.addAll(conCreated);
        }
        System.debug(objList.size());
        return objList;
    }
}

🎥 Watch It in Action!

Want to see how this works in the Developer Console? Watch my short demo where I query records live and explain each step in real time.