Salesforce Tutorial: Learn To Create Your Own Salesforce App

In this Salesforce tutorial blog, I will show you how to create a custom Salesforce App. I will be creating an app called StudentForce which can be used to maintain student records.

This app will contain three different objects (tables) to store data. The first object called Students Data will contain the names of students and their personal details like email id, phone number and native city. The college, students belong to, will be stored in the second object called College and the third object called Marks will contain the marks obtained by the students in various subjects.

Salesforce Tutorial

I have covered the following topics in this Salesforce tutorial blog with step-by-step instructions and screenshots:

• How to create the app environment?
• What are tabs and how to create tabs in your app?
• What are profiles and how to customize user profiles?
• How to create objects in the app?
• How to create fields in objects and define their data type?
• How to add entries (fields) into these objects?
• How to link (create a relationship between) two different objects?

Before I get started with creating an app, let me introduce you to the cloud environment where Salesforce apps are built.

Salesforce Org

The cloud computing space offered to you or your organization by Force.com is called Salesforce org. It is also called Salesforce environment. Developers can create custom Salesforce Apps, objects, workflows, data sharing rules, Visualforce pages and Apex coding on top of Salesforce Org.

Let us now deep dive into Salesforce Apps and understand how it functions.

Salesforce Apps

The primary function of a Salesforce app is to manage customer data. Salesforce apps provide a simple UI to access customer records stored in objects (tables). Apps also help in establishing relationship between objects by linking fields.

Apps contain a set of related tabs and objects which are visible to the end user. The below screenshot shows, how the StudentForce app looks like.

The highlighted portion in the top right corner of the screenshot displays the app name: StudentForce. The text highlighted next to the profile pic is my username: Vardhan NS.

Before you create an object and enter records, you need to set up the skeleton of the app. You can follow the below instructions to set up the app.

Steps To Setup The App

1. Click on Setup button next to app name in top right corner.
2. In the bar which is on the left side, go to Build → select Create → select Apps from the drop down menu.

Click on New as shown in the below screenshot

1. Choose Custom App.
2. Enter the App Label. StudentForce is the label of my app. Click on Next.

1. Choose a profile picture for your app. Click Next.
2. Choose the tabs you deem necessary. Click Next.
3. Select the different profiles you want the app to be assigned to. Click Save.

In steps 7 and 8, you were asked to choose the relevant tabs and profiles. Tabs and profiles are an integral part of Salesforce Apps because they help you to manage objects and records in Salesforce.

In this salesforce tutorial, I will give you a detailed explanation of Tabs, Profiles and then show you how to create objects and add records to it.

Salesforce Tabs

Tabs are used to access objects (tables) in the Salesforce App. They appear on top of the screen and are similar to a toolbar. It contains shortcut links to multiple objects. On clicking the object name in a tab, records in that object will be displayed. Tabs also contain links to external web content, custom pages and other URLs. The highlighted portion in the below screenshot is that of Salesforce tabs.

All applications will have a Home tab by default. Standard tabs can be chosen by clicking on ‘+’ in the Tab menu. Accounts, Contacts, Groups, Leads, Profile are the standard tabs offered by Salesforce. For example, Accounts tab will show you the list of accounts in the SFDC org and Contacts tab will show you the list of contacts in the SFDC org.

Steps To Add Tabs

1. Click on ‘+’ in the tab menu.
2. Click on Customize tabs, which is present on the right side.
3. Choose the tabs of your choice and click on Save

Besides standard tabs, you can also create custom tabs. Students tab that you see in the above screenshot is a custom tab that I have created. This is a shortcut to reach the custom object: Students.

Steps To Create Custom Tabs

1. Navigate to Setup → Build → Create → Tabs.
2. Click on New.
3. Select the object name for which you are creating a tab. In my case, it is Students Data. This is a custom object which I have created (the instructions to create this object is covered later in this blog).
4. Choose a tab style of your preference and enter a description.
5. Click on Next → Save. The new Students Data tab will appear as shown below.

Salesforce Profiles

Every user who needs to access the data or SFDC org will be linked to a profile. A profile is a collection of settings and permissions which controls what a user can view, access and modify in Salesforce.

A profile controls user permissions, object permissions, field permissions, app settings, tab settings, apex class access, Visualforce page access, page layouts, record types, login hour and login IP addresses.

You can define profiles based on the background of the user. For example, different levels of access can be set for different users like system administrator, developer and sales representative.

Similar to tabs, we can use any standard profile or create a custom profile. By default, the available standard profiles are: read only, standard user, marketing user, contract manager, solution manager and system administrator. If you want to create custom profiles, you have to first clone standard profiles and then edit that profile. Do note that one profile can be assigned to many users, but one user cannot be assigned many profiles.

Steps To Create A Profile

1. Click on Setup → Administer → Manage users → Profiles
2. You can then clone any of the existing profiles by clicking on Edit

Once the tabs and profiles are set up for your App, you can load data into it. The next section of this Salesforce tutorial will thus cover how data is added to objects in the form of records and fields.

Objects, Fields And Records In Salesforce

Objects, Fields and Records are the building blocks of Salesforce. So, it is important to know what they are and what role they play in building Apps.

Objects are the database tables in Salesforce where data is stored. There are two types of objects in Salesforce:

• Standard objects: The objects provided by Salesforce are called standard objects. For example, Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, Campaigns, Products, Reports, Dashboard etc.
• Custom objects: The objects created by users are called custom objects.