BY JIM MARKLE, RIGHTSTAR SYSTEMS
You’ve built that great “New Hire” Service Request. But you need some custom picklist data not available in the Incident object. None of the needed data is available and what’s there does not have multiple columns you can fill with custom data.
Well, create a custom object with exactly the data you need and add it to the Service Request input as a lookup object! You can do this!
Let’s add a lookup table listing of “Security Access Levels” to a new hire Service Request. After clicking on the picklist button we need a listing of Security Access choices. In this example we’ll see a list of Security Access Names (SL04, SL05, etc) that can then be selected. That selection will transfer to the input text field. Each choice is displayed with Security Level names and Descriptions or whatever you want to add. Here’s what it looks like in a New Hire Service Request:
To build this functionality all we need is the following:
- A custom object with several custom fields.
- A tab to access the custom object. (We’ll need to add the data, right?)
Since you already know how to build a custom object, I’ll fast forward to the details. Your custom object will need, in our example, two custom fields. The custom field names used here are “Security Level” and “Description”. Now the real magic to making this work is the Column Header field set. You’ll need to create that field set. In the object, select New from the Field Sets section. Then enter the below information. You can name it what you want but that LinkRecords name is what you have to use for the Field Set Name. It becomes the API Name used to make all this work:
Save it and this is what will now be displayed in the Field Set section:
The Custom Fields & Relationships section will look like this after you add those custom fields:
After defining the field set and the custom fields we can now “connect” the field set with the fields . . .
That’s basically step 1 from above. Now let’s work on step 2 and give this object a tab. Remember where you created the custom object? Scroll down a bit and click on Tabs. Ok, here it is:
Under Custom Object Tabs select New. Here’s what I entered for the Security Access object’s tab:
The next two screens will show the usual “Add to Profiles” and “Add to Custom Apps” pages. Take the defaults. You can now access your new Security Access object with a tab. Cool, eh?
What next? Access your new Security Access object with a tab! That’s where you’ll enter each of the choices you want presented in the popup window in the Service Request:
The object is now defined with a few values and the columns are ready to display in our Service Request. Last piece: Add “Security Access” to the Request Definition as a Lookup Input object. Here’s how it will look when you add it as a new Fulfillment Input:
And that input definition will result in what you see up above in that first screenshot . . . so we’ve closed the loop!
So…go forth and build thy self a custom object with multiple columns!