Displaying Field Values and Page Layouts According to Profiles

Before we give our security and sharing model a thorough testing, let's leverage the work we've done to further enhance our app's usability and, at the same time, give our data integrity a little boost.

Both usability and data integrity are adversely affected by irrelevant data. The less irrelevant data we display to users, the better off everyone will be. Not only can irrelevant data be confusing and impede a user's efficiency, but it also makes he or she more prone to entering incorrect values. By taking away unnecessary choices, we reduce the risk of making avoidable mistakes.

Although we've already put plenty of thought into our app's usability, there's always room for improvement. We won't go into a detailed usability analysis here, but let's make minor modifications to get a feel for some of the ways you can improve the usability and data integrity of your apps in the future.

The modifications we're going to make involve position records. Currently, each position record displays the same data, even though there are a few items on the position record that are of no use to recruiters who create positions for departments other than Development. For example, a recruiter who is creating a position for a Sr. Financial Analyst would have no use for the Required Programming Languages section.

By the same token, there are some options on position records that have nothing to do with technical positions, such as the Human Resources and Warehousing values in the Functional Area picklist. Wouldn't it be nice if we could create two types of position records: one with IT-related data for IT positions, and another for non-IT personnel?

Fortunately, we can with record types! Record types allow you to specify categories of records that display different picklist values and page layouts. You can also associate record types with profiles, so you can specify the picklist values and page layouts that different types of users can see in record detail pages.

To address the issues discussed above, we'll create two position record types. The first position record type will be for IT positions and will include the Required Programming Languages section of the page layout. Additionally, it will exclude all of the options in the Functional Area picklist except for Information Technology and Miscellaneous. The second position record type will be for all non-IT positions and will include all of the Functional Area picklist values except for Information Technology, but will omit the Required Programming Languages section.