Declarative Sharing Vs Apex Managed Sharing

Force.com platform provides declarative sharing option which are easy to configure and meets basic data sharing requirements.

Different declarative sharing options

• Record Ownership

Record owner will have read, edit, delete, share and transfer access.

• Teams

Account teams, sales team and case team allow group of users to have access to different account, opportunities and case records.

• Role hierarchy

This allow users in higher role to have same level of access to data which users have in lower hierarchy.

• Sharing rules

You can create owner based or criteria based sharing rules in system which will open up the record access to users. Records can be shared to public group, roles,roles and internal subordinates, roles internal and portal subordinates etc.

Sharing rules also allow to share data with external users. The default external access level must be more restrictive or equal to default internal access level.

For example, if external sharing default is set to Public Read-Only for custom object, then valid internal default settings will be Private and Public Read Only.

• Manual Sharing

Manual Sharing is also known as User Managed Sharing. This option allow user to share record manually with another user or public group, portal roles, portal users, roles, roles and internal subordinates, roles internal and portal subordinates etc.

Remember if record owner share record manually with another user and later on record owner changes, then manual sharing record will be deleted.

Apex Managed Sharing

This allows developers to share records by using apex code. This is also known as "Programmatic Sharing". Object share records can be created for standard and custom object but custom sharing reason can be defined for custom object only.

For example, if we have to share a record with a user specified in lookup field, then you can use trigger to create record in share table to provide access. 

Valid access level for records are Edit/ Read.

If OWD for object is either Public Read only or Private, then share table will exist for that object. You can create record in that share table to provide access to any user. Below are 4 fields you need to specify in order to create record in share table:

• ParentId : 15 digit or 18 digit id of record which you want to share.
• UserOrGreoupId : User id or group Id
• Access Level : Edit or Read. This field must be set to an access level that is higher than the organization’s default access level for the parent object.
• RowCause : You can specify the reason for sharing record. First define sharing reason for custom object. For standard object, you can specify Manual.

 You can not update ParentId field.

You can share record with same user or group by using different sharing reasons.

Consideration while using Apex Managed Sharing

• If record owner changes, then sharing created through apex managed sharing (if row cause is not manual and uses custom sharing reasons) are maintained but if user share record manually, then record sharing will be lost if owner changes.
• User with "modify All Data" can only add, edit or delete records in share table.