Objects and Tabs

An object in Salesforce is a database table that stores a collection of records and fields. Here, fields act as table columns while records act as rows.

Before reading 4th tutorial, please read Salesforce Admin tutorial – 3, explains about how to create Salesforce Apps.

Salesforce comes with some built-in standard objects. But it allows users to create custom objects as well. We can refer to both standard and custom objects as Sobjects, which stands for Salesforce objects. 

Salesforce Developer edition puts a limit of 400 objects per org. 

A tab, on the other hand, is a link you can create to an object on Salesforce. It gives you a UI path to access an object quickly and easily. There are four types of tabs: custom, web, VF, LC, and LP. 

For now, let’s look at custom tabs. 

Let’s see how to create a new “Employee” object and a tab that links to it. 

On the Salesforce home page, click on the Object Manager to view a list of objects available in your app. Currently, it consists of standard objects provided by Salesforce like Account and Activity. 

To create a custom object in the app, click on the “Create” dropdown in the top right corner and select the “Custom Object” option. It takes you to a new page to enter the details of the new object. 

You can add the object label (Employee), plural label (Employees), and other necessary information here. 

It contains numerous options to customize your object, such as selecting its data type, allowing reports, allowing search, and setting deployment status. Setting the “Allow search” option makes your object discoverable through global search. You also need to set its deployment status to “Deployed” to ensure the object gets created as expected. 

You can also check the “Launch New Custom Tab Wizard after saving the custom object” option to ask for Salesforce’s help in creating a tab for the object. So now, once you save the new object, Salesforce takes you to the Custom Tab Wizard page. 

Here, you can pick the tab style for the object. Then, click next. 

Keep the options on the second page in their default values and move to the next page. 

Here, select the apps that this tab should be included in according to your requirements.

Once the selection is finished, you can save the tab and view a detailed view of the newly created object.  

It shows the API name as “Employee__c.” This objectname__c format is specific to custom objects created on Salesforce. You can verify this by checking the Object Manager, where only custom objects have API names like this, not the custom ones. 

Now, if you go to your custom app and check its tabs, you’ll be able to see the new tab linking to the Employee object. 

You can create a new record for this object by clicking the “New” button in the top right corner. It shows that our Employee object already has a field called “Employee Name” even though we didn’t create one ourselves. This comes by default from Salesforce. 

If you add an employee name and create a new record, you’ll see more information Salesforce has added to it by default. 

• Created By
• Owner
• Last Modified By

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