Conference Management Application — Salesforce project (Part 1 : Initial Application creation & Setup)
Salesforce as we all know is the world’s #1 leading Customer Relationship Management platform. And I was fortunate enough to start my career working on this platform and have been in love with this CRM ever since. I recently started working on getting the Platform Developer Certificate 1 and thought to myself what the best way would be to understand the concepts and get hands on experience with the platform at the same time. Of course my first go to was TRAILHEAD 😊, but I wanted to explore more than that, so I thought of building a Conference Management Application on the Salesforce platform to help me with the same.
In this article I would like to take you through the complete process of all the steps I followed to build the Conference Management App. Since this is a huge build I will be releasing the blog posts in parts. This article is the first part that will cover the Initial application creation and creation of all custom objects.
The topics follow this order
Stage 1 — Planning
1. Business case
2. User stories
3. ERD
Stage 2 — The Build
- Create the application
2. Creating objects (standard & custom)
3. Application functionality
(i) Creating classes and triggers to perform various actions
(ii) Creating validations for certain objects
Business Case
The Event Management Application is aimed for businesses that are looking to conduct events. The application supports the booking of sessions by letting users choose the date and time of the sessions, book rooms for the sessions, assign speakers for each session, book participants for sessions.
User stories
a. Conference organiser
(i) As a Conference organiser, I want to be able to book a conference by entering the date and time of the conference.
(ii) As a conference organiser, I want to be able to book sessions for the conference.
(iii) As a conference organiser, I want to be able to add speakers to each session.
(iv) As a conference organiser, I want to be able to send out an email once a speaker has been assigned a session.
(iii) As a conference organiser, I want to be able to add participants to each session.
(iv) As a conference organiser, I want to be able to add Equipment's onto the Salesforce platform.
(v) As a conference organiser, I want to be able to book equipment's for each individual session.
ERD
STEP 1: Create an Application
Go to setup and type app on the Quick Find Box.
Click on the New button.
Select Custom app option.
Enter the desired name of the application.
Select from Available tabs the tabs you wish to appear on the apps ribbon tab.
STEP 2: Create objects
The custom objects to be created for the Conference application are
(Conference | Sessions | Speakers | Participants | Equipment’s | Rooms | Waitlist)
Junction objects were also created as most of the objects had many to many relationships.
These are the objects we are now about to create.
In the list above the objects marked in the color RED are the junction objects.
I will now show you how to create 2 custom objects (Conference & Session) and 1 junction object (ConferenceSession).
Navigate to the Conference management application by following the steps below.
Let us now create Conference object.
Go to Setup
Type Objects in Quick find box.
Click on New Custom Object.
Fill in the following fields the same way as done below.
Click on Save.
Select Tab style and click Next.
Leave this page as it is and click Next.
Click on Include Tab check box on top and click Save.
Conference custom object is now created.
Now let’s create the Session object.
Click on Setup.
Select objects.
Click on New Custom object.
Fill out the details for Session object.
Click on Save button.
Choose a tab style and click on Next.
Keep the Add to profiles page as it is and click Next.
Make sure Include Tab check box is selected and click Save.
Now let us create the junction object ConferenceSession.
Follow the steps as above Setup → Objects → New Custom Object.
Enter the Following details to create the object.
Note: For this object do not select the “Launch New Tab” option.
Click Save.
Now to make this object a Junction object, we need to create Master — Detail relationships. To do that, click on the New button.
Select Master — detail relationship and click Next.
Select Conference for the Related To tab. Click Next.
Fill in the information and click Next.
Keep the Establish field level security as it is and click Next.
Keep the Add reference field to Page layouts as it is and click Next.
Type Sessions onto the Related List Label box and click Save and New. Do the same for the Sessions object and for Related List enter Conference into the field and click Save.
(Create all the other custom objects and junction objects the same way)
STEP 3: Create custom fields for all custom objects
Create fields for the Conference object.
Go to Setup → Objects → Select the Conference object.
Click on New.
Click on Next.
Fill in the following information and click next.
Keep Establish field level security page as it is and click on Next.
Click on Save.
Conference Name field is now created. Create all the fields in the Conference object.
Object name: Conference
Fields:
Conference Name (Text)
Start Date (Date)
End Date (Date)
Create the below mentioned fields in Session object.
Object name: Session
Fields:
Conference ID (Lookup)
Description (Long text area)
Duration (in minutes) (Number)
Level (Picklist)
Maximum capacity (Number)
Number of seats booked (Roll-up summary) [COUNT sessionparticipant]
Session Date (Date)
Session End Time (Formula(Time)
Session Full (Checkbox)
Session ID (Auto number)
Session Start Time (Time)
Waitlist participants (Roll-up summary) [COUNT sessionparticipant]
The Session object had Lookup fields, Roll-up summary fields and Formula fields which I will now show you how to create.
Let us create the Conference ID lookup field.
In the Session object click New. Select the Lookup option and click on Next.
Click on Next.
Click on Next.
Make sure the Visible check box is checked and click Next.
Click Next.
Click Save.
Now let us create the Roll up summary field Number of seats booked. This Roll up is based on the Session Participant object. So for that Participant object and SessionParticipant object were created. Follow the steps we did to create custom and junction objects.
To create the Number of seats booked field go to the Session object click New under custom fields and relationships. Select Roll-up summary and click Next.
Enter Number of Seats Booked in the label and click Next.
Enter the details given below and click Next.
Click Save. Create all other Roll up summary fields the same way. We will now see how to create the Session End Time formula field.
Select formula as the field type and click Next.
Enter the above information and click Next.
Enter the formula check the syntax and press Next.
Keep this page as it is and click Next.
Click Save.
Next create the fields for Speaker object
Object name: Speaker
Fields:
Bio (Long text area)
Email (Email)
First name(Text)
Last name (Text)
Phone number (Phone)
Picture (Formula[Text])
Picture path (Text)
Object name: Equipment
Fields:
Equipment name (Text)
Quantity available (Number)
Object name: Room
Fields:
Room number (Number)
Room name (Text)
Room maximum capacity (Number)
Object name: Waitlist
Fields:
First Name (Text)
Last Name (Text)
Email (Email)
Phone number (Phone)
Session name (Text)
We have now come to the end of this article. Part 2 of the project coming up soon. Happy learning 😊