Entering Data
Although you have been simply defining fields that will be part of the Location object, the page layouts associated with that object have also been changing. The best way to see the results of those changes is to simply access the tab.
1. | Click the Locations tab at the top of the page, and then click New to bring up the page shown in below. You could also use the Create New picklist in the left hand panel and click the Location object in that list. Since you did not uncheck the option to add the fields to the page layout, the fields you have added to your object are automatically added to its associated layouts. Although you might want to modify how these fields are laid out on the page (and will shortly), you might as well enter a location record while you are on this page. |
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3. | Enter 10 digits for the Phone field and tab to the next field.. Notice how the Force Platform automatically formatted the Phone data type field for you. In a similar manner, do not enter the http:// for the URL field, since the data type automatically places that prefix on the URL. |
4. | Enter a URL, such as www.salesforce.com, and click Save to display the detail page for the record you just entered, as shown below |
When you click Save, an entry with a link for the record you just created is also placed in the Recent Items list in the left hand panel, along with the icon you assigned for the related tab to identify the object type. By keeping a list of the most recent records of all object types with tabs defined, the Recent Items list makes it easy to switch rapidly between records of different types.
This may seem like a little thing, but this combination of object records in a single list points back, yet again, to the metadata driven nature of the Force Platform. Every record in every object in the Force Platform database has a unique identifier. This identifier points to an individual record, whose metadata includes the object which holds the record. When a user requests that record, the Force Platform knows the record belongs to that object, and uses metadata to create the user interface.
You can see that some of the items listed in the detail page are shown as links. The link for the Location Map leads to the URL you entered for that field, while the Created By, Owner, and Last Modified By fields link to related records in the standard User objects. Clicking the link for any of these last three fields brings up the detail page for the listed user.
The automatic creation and deployment of these page layouts is a great productivity feature, especially since you can easily modify the layout of the fields on that tab.