Log into your Force Platform account. Your account resides in a Force Platform organization, or org, as described in the first chapter of this book. Your account opens onto the home page for the default application, as shown in below.

A set of links displays at the top, right-hand side of the page. Click the Setup link to enter the Setup menu, shown in the figure below.

The Setup menu has a set of menu choices on the left, grouped into three categories:

• Personal Setup - allows you to customize the interface and environment for the current user

• App Setup - contains the choices you use for most of your development work

• Administration Setup - provides a number of options for managing your Force Platform org

You are now ready to create an application.

Click the plus sign (+) to the left of the Create option in the App Setup section to expand your set of choices.

Click Apps to begin creation of your application. A list of currently installed applications displays. The list has two buttons at the top, giving you the ability to specify the order for the existing applications in the application picklist, as well as the ability to create a new application.

Click New to bring up the page shown below.

Assign an App Label of Recruiting for your new application. The Label field is preceded by a red line, indicating that a value is required. Required fields in your application display the same indicator.

Tab through the App Name field to set the value to the App Label.

Give your new application a description, such as The sample Recruiting application.

Before leaving this page, note your position in the overall definition process, indicated by the label in the upper right corner of the header page, as shown below.

Click Next

The next page allows you to assign a logo for your application. The logo must be stored in a Force Platform document, conforming to the size and layout restrictions listed on the page. For this application, you can simply click Next.

You can now indicate any existing tabs you want to use in this application, as well as specifying which of these tabs is the landing tab for the application. Since you will be creating this application from scratch, you do not need to add any of these tabs, although you can always come back and add tabs to your application with the same interface. Click Next to bring up the page shown below.

This final step in creating an application is extremely important. Access to your application, as well as many other entities on the Force Platform, are controlled through the use of profiles. Every user is assigned a profile, which typically represents a group of users. This page, which assigns access to this application based on profiles, is repeated for most of the interface components you create. Profiles, and how they are used in the Force Platform security scheme, is covered in detail in Chapter 7: Protecting Your Data. For now, you can simply make your application visible to all user profiles by clicking the checkbox at the top of the Visible column.

You should also make your new application the default app for all of the profiles with the checkboxes in the second column if you are using an organization specifically for the use of the exercises in this book.

Click Save to complete your work

That’s right, complete your work. You have just defined an application, and you can prove it immediately.

Go to the Application picklist and select the Recruiting application to bring up the page shown in the figure below.

You have just had your first experience of the power of on-demand development. When you were defining your application, you were actually specifying the metadata attributes that are used by the Force Platform to present the application. Once you completed the definition process, the application was listed as one of the values in the Application picklist. When you selected an application, the Force Platform constructed the application from the metadata for the application.

This immediacy is a core part of the Force Platform environment. As soon as you define a Force Platform entity, the entity is available to those with the proper access rights. You will be experiencing this power repeatedly as you create applications on the platform.

The application you have created is not much more than a shell at this early stage. You can see that there is only a Home tab, required for all applications, and no others, since you did not include other tabs when you defined the application. But the tabs that you did not select for the application are still available through the right arrow tab.

Click the right arrow tab to bring up the page shown below.