In the previous blogs you have learned what Salesforce is and various Salesforce certifications. In this Salesforce tutorial blog, I’ll show you how to create a custom Salesforce app. I’m going to create an app called StudentForce that can be used to manage student files.
This app contains three different objects (tables) for storing data. The first object, named Student Information, contains the students’ names and their personal information such as email ID, phone number, and place of birth. The college the students belong to is stored in the second object called College, and the third object called Marks contains the grades the students got in different subjects received.
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Salesforce Tutorial
I covered the following topics in this Salesforce Tutorial blog with step-by-step instructions and screenshots :
- How to create the app environment?
- What are tabs and how to create tabs in your app?
- What are profiles and how are user profiles customized?
- How do I create objects in the app?
- How do I create fields in objects and define their data type?
- How do I add entries (fields ) into these objects?
- How can I link two different objects (create a relationship between them)?
Before I start building an application, I want to Introduce you to the cloud environment in which d he Salesforce applications are created.
Salesforce Org
The cloud computing space offered y you or your organization by Force.com is called Salesforce org. It is also referred to as the Salesforce environment. Developers can build custom Salesforce apps, objects, workflows, data sharing rules, Visualforce pages, and Apex coding on top of Salesforce Org. Get your Salesforce Sales Cloud certification today to get certified.
Now let’s dive deep into the Salesforce apps and understand how they work.
Salesforce Apps
The primary function of a Salesforce app is to manage customer data. Salesforce apps provide a simple user interface for accessing customer records stored in objects (tables). Apps also help establish relationships between objects by linking fields.
Apps contain a number of related tabs and objects that are visible to the end user. The following screenshot shows what the StudentForce app looks like.
Click New as shown in the screenshot below. Select Custom App. Enter the App Label. StudentForce is my app’s label. Click Next.
Choose a profile picture for your app. Click Next. Select the tabs you think are necessary. Click Next. Select the different profiles you want to assign the app to. Click Save.
In steps 7 and 8 you were prompted to select the appropriate tabs and profiles. Tabs and profiles are an integral part of Salesforce apps because they help you manage objects and records in Salesforce.
In this Salesforce tutorial, I’ll give you a detailed explanation of tabs and profiles, and then show you how to create objects and add records to them.
Salesforce Tabs
Tabs are used to access objects (tables) in the Salesforce app. They appear at the top of the screen and resemble a toolbar. It contains links to several objects. Clicking the object name in a tab displays records in that object. Tabs also contain links to external web content, custom pages, and other URLs. The highlighted part in the screenshot below is that of the Salesforce tabs.
All applications have a Home tab by default. Standard tabs can be selected by clicking “+” in the tab menu. Accounts, Contacts, Groups, Leads, Profile are the default tabs offered by Salesforce. For example, the Accounts tab shows you the list of accounts in the SFDC organization and the Contacts tab shows you the list of contacts in the SFDC organization.
Steps to add tabs
- Click “+” in the tab menu.
- Click Customize tabs
- Click Customize Tabs
- i> present on the right.
- Select the tabs of your choice and click Save.
In addition to standard tabs, you can also create custom tabs. The Students tab you see in the screenshot above is a custom tab I created. This is a shortcut to reach the custom object: Student.
Steps to create custom tabs
- Navigate to Setup → Build → Build → Tabs.
- Click New.
- Select the object name for which you are creating a tab. In my case it is student data. This is a custom object I created (instructions for creating this object are covered later in this blog).
- Choose a tab style of your choice and enter a description.
- Click Next → Save. The new Student Data tab will appear as shown below.
Salesforce Profiles
Any user accessing the data must, or SFDC org is associated with a profile. A profile is a collection of settings and permissions that controls what a user can view, access, and change in Salesforce.
A profile controls user permissions, object permissions, field permissions, application settings, tab settings, and Apex class access , Visualforce page access, page layouts, record types, login time, and login IP addresses.
You can define profiles based on the user’s background. For example, different access levels can be set for different users such as sysadmin, developer, and sales rep.
Similar to tabs, we can use any default profile or create a custom profile. By default, the standard profiles available are: Read Only, Standard User, Marketing User, Contract Manager, Solution Manager, and System Administrator. If you want to create custom profiles, you need to clone default profile first and then edit this profile. Note that a profile can be assigned to many users, but not many profiles to one user.
Steps to create a profile
- Click on Setup → Manage → Manage Users → Profiles
- You can then clone any of the existing profiles by clicking Edit.
Once the tabs and profiles are set up for your app, you can upload data. So the next section of this Salesforce tutorial covers how to add data to objects in the form of records and fields.
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Objects, Fields, and Records in Salesforce
Objects, fields, and records are the building blocks of Salesforce. So it’s important to understand what they are and what role they play in building apps.
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Objects are the database tables in Salesforce that store data. There are two types of objects in Salesforce:
- Standard objects: The objects provided by Salesforce are called standard objects. For example, Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, Campaigns, Products, Reports, Dashboard, etc.
- Custom Objects: The objects created by users are called custom objects.
Objects are a collection of records and records are a collection of fields.
Each line in an object consists of many fields. Thus, a record in an object is a combination of related fields. Consider the following Excel for illustration.
I’m going to create an object called Students Data that will contain students’ personal data.
Steps to create a custom object:
- Navigate to Setup → Create → Create → Object
- Click New Custom Object.
- Enter the object name and the description. As you can see in the image below, the object name is Students Data.
- Click Save.
If you want to add this custom object to the tab menu, you can follow the instructions mentioned earlier in this Salesforce tutorial blog.
After creating the object, you need to define different fields in this object. E.g. The fields in a student’s record are the student’s name, the student’s phone number, the student’s email ID, the department a student belongs to, and their hometown.
You can’t create records until add to objects after you define the fields.
Steps to add custom fields
- Navigate to Setup → Create → Create → Objects
- Select this object to which you want to add fields. In my case it is Student Data.
- For this object, scroll down to Custom Fields and Relationships and click New as shown in the screenshot below.
- You need to select the data type of this particular field and then click Next. I have Text Format because I will be storing letters in this field.The different data types of fields have been explained in detail in the next section of this blog.
- You will then be prompted to enter the name of the field , enter the maximum length of this field and a description.
- You can also make it an optional/required field and allow/disallow duplicate values for different records by ticking the checkboxes See the following screenshot for a better understanding.
- Click Next.
- Select the different profiles that fill this text box edit later Click Next.
- Select the page nlayouts to contain this field.
- Click Save.
As you can see in the screenshot below, there are two types of fields: standard fields created by default for each object and custom fields created by me. The four fields I created for Student Info are City, Department, Email ID, and Phone Number. You will notice that all custom fields have the suffix “__C” indicating that you have permission to edit and delete these fields. While some standard fields can be edited but not deleted.
You can now add student records (full row) to your object.
Steps to add a record
- Go to the object table from the tab menu. Students Datais the object I will be adding records to.
- As you can see from the image below, there are no existing records. Click New to add new student records.
- Insert student details into different fields as shown in the screenshot below. Click Save.
- You can create as many student records as you like. I created 4 student records as shown in the following screenshot.
- If you want to edit the student data, you can click Edit as shown in the screenshot below.
Field data types
The data type controls which data types can be stored in a field. Fields within a record can have different data types. Example:
- If this is a phone number field, you can select Phone.
- If it is a name or a text field, you can select Text.
- If it is a date/time field, you can select Date/Time.
- By choosing Choose Listas the data type for a field, you can write predefined values into that field and create a dropdown menu.
You can select one of the data types for custom fields. Below is a screenshot listing the different data types.
Data types such as search relationship, master-detail relationship and external search relationshipare used to establish links/relationships between them to create one or more objects. Relationships between objects are the next discussion topic in this Salesforce tutorial blog.
Object relationship in Salesforce
As the name suggests, object relationships are used in Salesforce, to create a link between two objects. The question in your mind would be why is it necessary? Let me talk about necessity using an example.
In my StudentForce app, there is a Students Data object that contains students’ personal information. Details of students’ grades and their previous studies are present in various objects. We can use relationships to link these objects to related fields. Student and college grades can be linked to the Student Name field of the Student Data object.
Relationships can be defined when selecting the data type. They are always defined in the child object and referenced to the common field in the main object. Creating such links helps you easily search and query data when the required data exists in different objects. There are three different types of relationships that can exist between objects.They are:
- Master Detail
- Lookup
- Junction
Let’s take a look at each one throw of them :
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Master-Detail Relationship (1:n)
Master-Detail Relationship is a parent-child relationship in which the master object controls the behavior of the dependent object. It is a 1:n relationship in which there can be only one parent but many children. In my example, Students Data is the main object and Marks is the child object.
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Let me give you an example of a master-detail relationship. The Students Data object contains student records. Each record contains personal information about a student. However, the grades achieved by the students are contained in a different dataset called Brands. See the screenshot of the Marks object below.
I created a link between these two objects using the student’s name have. Below are the points to consider when setting up a master-detail relationship.
- Because this is the controlling object, the master field cannot be empty.
- When a record/field in the main object is deleted, the corresponding fields in the dependent object are also deleted. This is known as cascade deletion.
- Dependent fields inherit ownership, sharing, and security settings from their master.
You can create master-detail relationships between two custom fields define objects, or between a custom object and a default object, as long as the default object is the master in the relationship.
Lookup relationship (1:n)
Lookup relationships become Used when you want to create a link between two objects, but without the dependency on the parent object. You can think of this as a form of parent-child relationship where there is only one parent but many children i.e. a 1:many relationship. Below are the points to consider when setting up a lookup relationship.
- The lookup field on the child is not essential.
- The fields/records in a child Object cannot be deleted by deleting a record in the parent object. Therefore, the records in the child are not affected.
- The child fields do not inherit the ownership, sharing, and security settings of their parent.
An example of a lookup relationship would be in my case that of a College object. You can see the child object: Student Data in the following screenshot. You will notice that there is an empty College field for the first record. This indicates that the dependency is not a necessity.
Below is a screenshot of the schema diagram of both relationships. College – Student Data forms the lookup relationship and Student Data – Marks forms the master-detail relationship.
Self relation
This is a form of lookup relation where the relation is within the same table/object instead of two tables/objects. Hence the name self-relationship. Here the search is referenced to the same table. This relationship is also known as a hierarchical relationship.
Connection relationship (many-to-many)
This type of relationship can exist when there is a need for two Create master-detail relationships. By linking 3 custom objects, two master-detail relationships can be created. Here two objects are master objects and the third object is dependent on both objects. In simpler terms, it will be a child of both master objects.
To give you an example of this relationship, I’ve created two new objects.
- A main object named Professor. It contains the list of professors.
- A child object called Courses. It contains the list of available courses.
- I’m going to use the Students Data object as another main object.
I’ve created many -zu -many-relationship, so each record in the Courses object must have at least one student and at least one professor. This is because each course is a combination of students and professors.In fact, a course can have one or more students and professors associated with it.
The dependency on Student and Professor objects makes Courses as a child. Student and Professor are thus the master objects. Below is a screenshot of the Courses object.
You will notice that there are different combinations of professors and students for these subjects. For example, Kate is affiliated with two courses and has two different professors for each of those two courses. Mike is only assigned to one course, but has two different professors for that course. Both Joe and Kate are assigned to the same class and professor. See the screenshot below for the schematic diagram of this relationship.
Congratulations! The StudentForce App was created successfully. The two schema diagrams above show how the various objects in my Salesforce app are linked.
That brings us to the end of this Salesforce tutorial. I hope you understood the various concepts such as apps, tabs, profiles, fields, objects, and relationships explained in this Salesforce tutorial blog. If you have any doubts or questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments section below and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
I urge you to watch this Salesforce tutorial video showing the creation explains the Salesforce student app. Go ahead, enjoy the video and tell me what you think.
Stay tuned in for the next blog in our Salesforce tutorial series. In the meantime, I would suggest you create a Salesforce account and play around with the Salesforce app. You can try building your own app by following the instructions above.
If you want to become a professional Salesforce expert, check out our Salesforce training in Columbus, Live Training and real training includes life project experience.
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- Click Customize Tabs
