Standard objects are provided by Salesforce.com by default. Each standard object has its own uniqueness, and the objects are named by their common uses. Some of the main Salesforce.com objects when you subscribe for Sales or Service Cloud are as follows:

Some other standard objects are Activity, Asset, Contract, Quote, Order, Products, and Price Book.

Each standard object comes with default fields based on the purpose of the object, for example, Stage in Opportunity and Mobile Phone in Contact. You can create your own fields in a standard object called custom field. The maximum number of fields you can create depends on the Salesforce edition purchased.

Custom objects are specific objects created in your organization to store data for your business that does not fit into standard objects. Only a user with admin access is allowed to create custom objects. Most AppExchange packages create and use custom objects, since they provide specific business processes.

The maximum number of custom objects that can be created depends on the Salesforce edition. If you have admin permission, you can create objects and fields in Salesforce with just point-and-click rather than using complex SQL scripts as in traditional databases.

For a standard object, the number of standard fields depends on the object itself, but a custom object comes with a few standard fields that are the same for all custom objects:

Just as with a standard object, you can create custom fields in a custom object.

You can relate an object to other objects in Salesforce.com, for example, relating the Expense custom object to the Project custom object. With this relation, you can know for which project the specific expense is used. In this example, Project will be considered as the parent and Expense as the child object. Remember that one parent can have many children, while the child can have only one parent. To build this relationship from the child object, create a lookup or master-detail relationship field for the parent object.

There are two types of object relationships in Salesforce.com:

Here is the comparison between master-detail relationships and lookup relationships:

Salesforce.com comes with field data types that fit your business model. Some of them are built with business logic, such as e-mails and URLs, these need to follow valid e-mail and URL formats respectively. Invalid values will be automatically rejected by the system. When you define custom fields, the data type you select determines which additional options you can specify Required, Unique, Case sensitive, External ID, and Default Value.

Here is the list of Salesforce's data types:

It is advised that you get your hands on all exercises in this book in a Sandbox org or Developer Edition, not in the production environment, as you might change something without knowing.

If you do not have Sandbox org for testing, you can sign up and get Developer Edition for free by clicking on Sign Up at https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Developer_Edition.

Sandbox has an exact copy of your production configuration on the date of Sandbox creation or Sandbox refreshes. Depending on the Sandbox type, you can have a complete copy of production data, partial data, or no data in a Sandbox, but all of them will have a configuration copy from the production environment. We will discuss more on Sandbox in Chapter 2, Managing Data in Salesforce.com.

While Developer Edition is an environment without any relation to your production environment, it is good enough for you to try anything explained in this book.