Taking Our Simple App Mobile

Remember that mobile app we mentioned earlier? Salesforce1 hooks into your Salesforce organization and presents all your customizations and data in a mobile-friendly user interface. That means that anything you do in the full site will be reflected automatically in this mobile app, so your users will have access to the information they need, no matter where they are! This will be especially useful for our recruiters, who sometimes travel to find the best candidates for Universal Containers’ open positions. Let’s take a look at how the Positions tab and its fields appear in mobile.

1. Open Salesforce1 from your mobile device.
2. Enter your Salesforce credentials and tap Log in to Salesforce.

Notice that there isn’t a home tab. With our current configuration, the first thing that appears for users is the first item in the navigation menu. We’ll go over how to select which page appears when users first open Salesforce1 later in Analyzing Data with Reports and Dashboards.

3. Tap to open the navigation menu.

Now is a good time to talk about how apps and tabs work in Salesforce1. Earlier, we learned that each tab is represented through a menu item in the Recent section of the Salesforce1 navigation menu. Salesforce apps, such as the Sales app or a custom app, don’t appear in Salesforce1, because the mobile app figures out which records you look at most often. Rather than using the Force.com app menu to customize the tabs a user sees regularly, the smart search items under the Recent section reorder based on the user’s history of recent objects. Since our organization is new and we haven’t added any data yet, we see the default objects for now: accounts, cases, contacts, files, leads, and opportunities.

We don’t see our custom object in this list, so let’s look at the full list of smart search items.

4. Tap Show More.
5. Tap Positions.
6. Tap New to check out how our fields look in Salesforce1.

Just like in the full site, all the fields we made are here, and we can easily create a new position from our mobile device. That means we don’t have to duplicate our effort to create a pleasant mobile experience for our users. It just works!

Create Position Page in Salesforce1

Once again, welcome to the power of the Force.com platform. First we created a new Recruiting app with a single Home tab, then we created a Position object and tab, and now we've just added a few fields, all in less than 15 minutes of clicking around. From start to finish we always had a fully functional app, and we never had to spend any time compiling or debugging our “code!”

In the next chapter, we'll enhance our simple Recruiting app even further by adding some additional fields that are more complex, defining validation rules to help our data stay clean, and then moving the fields around in a page layout so users can more easily find and enter the information they need. Let's keep going!