Chapter 3. Relationships

In the last chapter, you laid the groundwork for your recruiting application and got familiar with some of the basics of Force Platform development through the Force Platform Setup menu. You are ready to start using one of the most powerful aspects of the Force Platform environment: relationships.

Early in the history of computing, scientists and designers realized that they could optimize the flexibility and performance of their database systems by breaking the stored data up into separate objects. This approach, known as normalization, allowed users to access smaller amounts of data in a table or an object.

Normalization worked well for data designers and developers, but users frequently required a broader view of their data than those fields that were contained in a single object. Relational databases offered a structure known as a foreign key, where a value in a child record pointed to the primary key of the parent, to make joining data from separate tables easier and to provide better performance. The Force Platform accomplishes this same goal through the use of relationship fields, as well as quite a bit more in the way of implementation.

Important

If you have been following the examples in the previous chapter, your Force Platform organization should be ready for the exercises in this chapter. If you have not done the exercises, or want to start with a fresh version of the sample Recruiting application, please refer to the instructions in the Code Share project for this book. You can find information on how to access that project in Chapter 1: Welcome to the Force Platform.