Building Blocks of a Force Platform Application

The Force Platform consists of a few core components. These core components define the outline of all applications you will build on the platform.

The figure below shows the way that these core pieces relate to each other.

The foundation for all Force Platform applications is the object. In practical terms, an object is roughly equivalent to a table in a relational database. As with a table, an object is a collection of fields that can be accessed and modified together.

You may hear veterans talk about custom objects and standard objects. A standard object is used in one of the standard applications sold by salesforce.com. This book, and your work as a developer, occasionally uses some of these standard objects in an application, but your focus is on custom objects, which are created specifically for use in your applications.

Note

The remainder of this book will use the term objects to refer to custom objects only by default.

In the Force Platform world, defining an object also generates the user interfaces to viewing and editing the data in that object. These default interfaces are accessed in the application through a tab on an HTML page, or as the target of links produced for the record in related objects or reports. The standard Force Platform application uses a tabbed interface, where the user can select a particular tab to display in a page in the application. When you create a tab for an object, the home page for that tab acquires several different features, such as showing a list of recently accessed records for that object on the tab as the default initial view, and automatically including fields from the object on the tab. If an object evolves over time, with additional fields, the user interfaces can automatically include the new components, as ou will see in this book. This automatic generation of a user interface increases your development productivity and shortens the time required for successive iterations of a tab and object.

Figure 9. Standard Force Platform user interface

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The figure above displays a Force Platform application. An application is a collection of tabs presented to the user. You define the tabs that are displayed in an application, and the user selects a particular application through the picklist in the upper right corner of the page, which is highlighted in the figure.

With these basic definitions out of the way, you are ready to create your first application and objects.