Visual Force

Last month we delivered our first component using Visual Force for an existing nonprofit organization using Salesforce.com. This organization helps families with children that have special needs.  Families call the organization daily to request information, and a Case needs to be created in Salesforce to store all related information.

This is working great if the family already exists in the database… Create new Case, attach the right contacts (parent and child), etc.  But what happens if it is a brand new family that does not already exist in the database?

Well…The case worker has to create a Contact usually a parent (the caller), one for the other parent, and finally one for the child. Once this is done a Case can be created to capture the requested information…all of that while being on the phone with the parent calling.  This is very inconvenient and time consuming.

 We decided to use Visual Force to simplify this process. We built a page that includes information about both parents, the child and the inquiry all in one visual force form The result is a single screen where a case worker can enter information about multiple record at once.

This allowed us to hide some of the database complexity for the end user. Behind the scene, both parent contacts  and the child are created, and all of them are connected via a Family custom object. Finally a Case is created for the caller.

Form Improvement: With this form, case workers have to first search the database to see if the family already exist. If it does they create a Case manually, if it does not they use the all-in-one form. It would be fantastic if the form could become a single point of entry regardless of the contact already existing or not. The vision is that you start typing a name and if it is found in the database, then it would auto fill some of the information, letting the case worker complement it with the new inquiry.

One disappointment:  Visual force does not support dependent pick lists. You have to manually reproduce the behavior using Apex.

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