Hi everyone,
i'm involved in a project that is moving a home-grown CRM tool into Salesforce - we're trying to keep as much of our old data as possible, and trying to fit some of our old data model into Salesforce. This has involved us creating a number of custom objects, and for the most part, we're having success in getting the data loaded.
However with this approach, i've been having some trouble writing some views in Salesforce. We have a number of custom objects in Salesforce. First, we have one called a "Publication" - they basically represent bound, published material that we distribute, and our contacts can subscribe to one or more publications. In our old data model, this type of relationship is accomplished with a simple mapping table:
- each contact has an ID
- each publication has an ID
- our mapping table has one or more rows for each contact ID
To accomplish this type of lookup in Salesforce, we created a ContactPublication object, which is just two lookup fields - one to a contact, and one to a publication object. When we load in our data, each contact ends up having the appropriate publications attached to their record.
The issue we're having is that when we try to create views based on this data, we're unable to use the publication data as part of the view criteria - that is, we can't make a view that says "Select all users that are subscribed to publication A or publication B," since the publication information isn't a field in the Contact object - it's merely a lookup between the contact and the publication.
does anyone have any experience with this? does anyone have any suggestions or best practices that they follow when trying to approach something like this (views where criteria is in related data, and not the object itself)?
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