I am really new to SalesForce development. As in, 'I was just handed this assignment the other day and I've never touched SalesForce in my life' new. So, I apologize in advance for any incorrect terminology that I may use.
To be honest, I think incorrect terminology is probably part of my problem, but let me lay it out for you.
To give myself a project to work on so I can try and learn some of the basic concepts, I've created a custom object in our sandbox called 'Orders' – which would, in theory, be a replacement for the order form we fill out now. I've added a handful of custom fields, and created associations to already existing objects, like Account and Contact etc. And that's going fine. I can create simple orders like that until I'm blue in the face.
Go me!
What I'm attempting to do from there is create a custom Order Detail page that will replace the default Order Detail view (I want to display additional data like contact email, contact phone, account address etc). I've created a new visualforce page and added some text in there. but I'm not having any luck figuring out how to use it with the order object.
The only tutorial I've been able to find that talks about creating custom detail pages deals with the Account object, which has an easy way to edit 'Buttons and Links'. I can't find anything comparable to that functionality with my custom object. The best I've been able to find is the layout editor on the object details page, but it just lets me move things around and doesn't teach me how to do what I want to do.
I know I'm probably missing some pretty fundamental pieces to this whole puzzle, and I probably skipped over a lot of steps I should have done, but if someone can point me in the right direction, I would really really appreciate it.
Best Answer
Here is what i would do
A) Create a custom object CUST_ORDER (you already did it)
2) Create a VF page use Standard Controller CUST_ORDER
3) try to display some fields from CUST_ORDER
4) then try to display some fields from related object
here is SFDC work book http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/workbook/index.htm
this should give you idea how create VF page, how to display fields from same and related objects.
you should refer tutorial # 9 : http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/workbook/index.htm
Best luck, Atul