Wednesday 8 February 2012

Simple.......... but Powerful Report Naming Convention

Almost all of the salesforce pages contain Section Header with Object Name above and Record Name below, as depicted here


This helps us to recognize and analyse things faster. But this convention was not explicitly available in Report & Dashboards.


Whenever we name a new report in salesforce, conventions like Hyphen (-), Comma (,), Space etc., were used in between words and these were replaced by an underscore in their API Names on a TAB hit.


These conventions cannot be avoided as we try to make report labels more understandable and meaningful. Usage of these conventions would be high, when several report labels follow  same pattern like


1. User Report-Mexico-West
2. User Report-Mexico-North
3. User Report-Mexico-East
4. User Report-Mexico-South


Suppose if we name and save a report as below,



which results in,




Suppose if we want to display the section header following hierarchy, then follow the convention of using colon(:) between Title and Subtitle.
Below image illustrates a report labelled and saved as Users Report:West ,



Interesting.. Isn't it? ........ and Hence the post name "Simple.......... but Powerful Report Naming Convention"


This behavior  can also be noted when a report is under creation,





Note: This convention may be followed and not neccessary