This article teaches all about basic Salesforce Admin stuff.

The Basics

Intro

Salesforce is a CRM (Customer Relation Management) software made to improve business sales, customer service, marketing automation and pioneered the SaaS model. It uses an Oracle-powered relational database to help gather, create, delete, and analyze corporate data. Recall that SaaS is a software level-first cloud delivery model where servers are only used as front for the product (unlike IaaS where admins need to control the inner works like the operating system).

Note: This article is based on this trailhead course.

For Salesforce Admins, there are many things to take note of:

• It's not just a database that holds client data, you can also use it for automate marketing tasks (Marketing Cloud Engagement).
• Apex is the server-side language that Salesforce runs on. It is a variant of the Java language and is frequently utilized for advanced users.
• The database relies on a dialect of SQL called SOQL designed for the Salesforce model.
• If you want to customize the frontend of your corporate web page apps, you can use Lightning Web Components (LWC) to customize the layout to your liking. The client-side runs on ECMAScript 7 while the server-side runs of Apex

Note: VisualForce is an older framework for building UI components. LWC can offer all of VisualForce's functionality with new and upgraded features.

Furthermore, depending on your business model, you can have each department meet their specific needs. For example, for the finance department, you can customize its dashboard to display budget/contract management and pricing.

For the sales executives:

There are some important terms to remember:

1. App: A set of objects, fields and other functionality to support a business process. You can find them by clicking on the App Launcher icon beside the word "Dreamhouse".
2. Object: SQL Table in Salesforce-speak
3. Record: SQL rows in Salesforce-speak
4. Field: SQL columns in Salesforce-speak

To create an org for the course (or you just want to make sure if it is there), go to Salesforce Trailhead and create an account. From there, create/launch your org in "Hands-on Org". You can find it by clicking on your profile then you can create one from there.

Custom Objects, Fields, and Relationships

Creating a Custom Object and Field

Custom objects in Salesforce are data that we need to track. Examples include "Invoices", "Job Postings", "Accounts", "Opportunities" etc. They are all nouns and need to broad as much as possible.

In this example, we can add "Job Posting" as an object:

1. In our default Homepage, Click on the gear icon, then click "setup"
2. Under "Quick Find", type "Object Manager". Click on it.
3. Click "Create" beside "Schema Builder". Then click "Custom Object".
4. For this example, we type in the Label "Job Posting". This will be the name for our custom object.
5. Click on "Allow Search". We enable this for testing purposes.
6. It is important not to ignore clicking on "Launch New Custom Tab Wizard after saving this custom object.". If you ignored this after creating the object, you will have to create the tab manually. Otherwise, it wouldn't be accessible from the client:
   1. Type "Tabs" in the Quick Find box in the Setup menu.
   2. Select Tabs under the User Interface section.
   3. Look for the Custom Object Tabs section and click New.
   4. Select "Job Posting" from the Object dropdown menu.
   5. Choose a Tab Style (the icon that will represent your object).
   6. Click Next, choose which profiles should see the tab, and click Save.
7. Everything else can be left as default.

For terminal enjoyers, here's a link. This can help you make changes to your org directly from your terminal.

Now go back to This is what adding our custom object looks like:

The "Job Posting Name" comes from the "Enter Record Name Label and Format" during the creation process. This needs to be treated like a high-level unique field to ease search results.

We can go back to our custom object we've created, click on "Fields & Relationships", click the record "Job Posting Name", then proceed changing the values like so:

Alright! Now we'll add a field in our object.

1. Go back to Object Manager in Setup if you're not there.
2. Find the custom object you've just created "Job Posting". Make sure its API name ends with "__c" (so "Job_Posting__c"). Double underscore c helps Salesforce identify custom metadata with all its methods and properties pre-set.
3. You should now see this:

4. Click on "Fields and Relationships"
5. Click "New"
6. You'll find several data types. For now, we can click on "Text Area" ("Text" requires you to specify the legnth while "Text Area" has the max length to 255).
7. Type in the Field Label "Job Title". This record is intended to be our actual title of the job post.

Note: Field Name is the API/server name of the field. Field Label is the front-end name of the field. It's good for both to have the same name.

8. Click on "Always require a value..." then click "Next"
9. If you're into adding more fields and saving this field, click "Save and Next". Otherwise, just click "Save".

You're free to add more objects. Try to create a scenario that looks like this:

Note: In case you added a field but it's not visible when you're adding a record, you have several options:

• Best method: Go to Setup, type in "Session Settings" in Quick Find, disable "Enable and persistent browser caching to improve performance", go back to the home page, type ctrl+f5 to clear the cache then let it reload. This should make the new field visible. Do know that this cannot be disabled in production, only in sandbox.

• Go to "Page Layouts", click on "Job Posting Layout", click "Save", then refresh the Salesforce home page (either a soft refresh ctrl+r, hard refresh ctrl+shift+r, or clear cache with ctrl+f5).

• Remove the new field from the information section in the "Page Layouts" page, Save it, refresh the page/clear the cache, put the new field back again, then refresh it again.

Relationships

TODO