function readOnly(count){ }
Starting November 20, the site will be set to read-only. On December 4, 2023,
forum discussions will move to the Trailblazer Community.
+ Start a Discussion
TheBombTheBomb 

Newbie wanted advice in representing our customers

Any help gratefully appreciated -- sorry this got so long.



We're trying to plan our implementation of Sales Force. We want to represent our customers within SF. When representing our customers, we want to recognise that we deal with many customers that are from within a single organisation. For example a head office with multiple offices that are geographically spread. This relationships between our customers in an organisation may be hierarchical, for example:



        Head Office

        /    |      \

      US     EU   ASPAC

     /  \             |      \

    NY  SF        Japan China


We want to represent this hierarchical nature of our customers within SF. From looking at the erd of the standard SF schema, our customers should be represente as Account objects. I have come to this conclusion because the Account object is the only hierarchical object that we can implement in SF. Is this correct? I could implement my own hierarchical object, but I can't create a relationship back to itself.



However, we see that we want to restrict the functionalities of each of the customers in the above hierarchy. For example, we may only want contracts to be associated with US, EU, Japan and China. Is there a way to filter the relationship between objects? I was thinking along the lines of simply filtering the list of available accounts available when selecting which account to relate with an object based on the object type (for example). Is this possible? Am I going down the wrong road?



Lastly, I would like to implement many to many links, say between objects A and B. Presumably the best (only?) way to do this is to implement another object A_has_B? This is not a problem, but when viewing the page for A, I would like to show a list of B objects showing certain information from B other than just it's name. Is this possible? Does anyone have experience of doing this?
RemendRemend
I've found playing with the 'setup' is the surest way to experiment with the possibilities; however, I myself rely on the API documentation and have found the db schema section very useful.