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Laying the Groundwork

Before jumping directly into the development tasks ahead of you, you need to learn about the data orientation of the Force Platform, the application you will be developing, and the data underling that application.

Welcome to the Force Platform

The designers of the Force platform are well aware of the importance of data to all systems. The Force Platform is all about data, and, as mentioned in the previous chapter, metadata. Part of the power and productivity of the Force Platform derive from this data-based approach to development and deployment.

The Force Platform delivers a lot of functionality that stems directly from your data design and specification. Good development practices call for you to carefully consider your data and its design to produce flexible and efficient applications. The Force Platform pays you back for this best practice with productivity, using the characteristics of your data design to build your applications.

The Sample Application

The application you will be building is an application designed to support and track the recruitment of employees for Universal Containers. Universal Containers is experiencing an explosive amount of growth, so finding and hiring new employees is crucial to their corporate health. This application will manage the interaction between positions and candidates, while also tracking the process of interviewing and evaluating those candidates.

This application will both manage information collected during the recruitment process and also contribute to that process by proactive intervention, helping to make the recruiting process more efficient.

This recruiting application was chosen as the core example for this book for a couple of reasons. Even though you may not be supporting an organization or department whose primary purpose is recruitment, you have no doubt been a part of that process, as an applicant or a hiring company. In addition, the recruiting process includes natural use cases that can take advantage of most of the features of the Force Platform.

There are a wide variety of applications you can develop and deploy on the Force Platform; for example, recruiting applications, project tracking applications, inventory systems and complete financial systems, as illustrated by some of the offerings on the salesforce.com

AppExchange. With the knowledge you will gain in this book, you will be well equipped to tackle almost any development task ahead of you on the Force Platform.

The Data

As mentioned above, the Force Platform database provides more than just simple data storage. Every Force Platform application provides automatic functionality based upon the design of your data structures.

The following figure lays out the basic data structures and relationships that you will be creating and using to build the recruiting application.

The complete data schema will be built up over the course of this book, with some sections emerging from your work in this chapter, and others entering the database in later chapters. For the purposes of this learning experience, it makes sense to only create data objects as you need them. For your own applications, of course, you should design and create robust data structures as a key initial step in your development effort. The better the data design, the more productive your development efforts over the lifetime of the application