This is the second part to the tutorial I presented last week about Automatically filling in the Account Name when entering the Opportunity Name. This tutorial will go into a little detail about the structure of a Salesforce URL and I’ll explain the code that we used last time.

Let’s get started, first you need to understand how the URL works.

The Basic Breakdown

First click the Opportunity tab. You get to the Opportunity Home page and the URL should look something like this:

https://na3.salesforce.com/006/o

So let’s dissect this. The na3 in the URL is the Salesforce server that hosts your application for your org. In this case, na3 means North America 3. The /006 is an ID for the object that you clicked. In this case 006 is the ID for the Opportunity object. The /o just means object home page. So altogether you have a URL that says “take me to the Object Home page for object 006″. If you change that 006 to 001 and hit enter, you should get to the Account Home page.

Introducing Parameters

Go back to the Opportunity Home Page and click new. The URL should now look like:

https://na3.salesforce.com/006/e?retURL=%2F006%2Fo

Now this is the exact same URL as before with a few changes. Notice you should still be on the same server and Object ID is still 006. But now instead of /006/o we have /006/e. The e means edit and that’s why you’re on the Opportunity Edit page. The ? is a standard way to denote the beginning of parameters in a URL. Notice the retURL parameter is set to %2F006%2Fo. The retURL parameter tells the application where to direct the user when they click ‘Cancel’ or ‘Save’. In this case %2F006%2Fo is a placeholder for the Opportunity Home Page. If you set the retURL to a specific record ID you will return to that record when you finish editing.

Add this to the end of the URL and press enter:

&opp3=Warrior Point -

Observe the Opportunity Name field. In general you can pass many parameters after the ? (question mark). It’s pretty straight forward. You specify the parameter name equal to some value. And each name/value pair is separated with an & (ampersand). In general it looks like this:

/006/e?param1=value1&param2=value2&param3=value3 …

Most standard and custom fields on any object can be pre-filled using a URL parameter. You just need to figure out the corresponding parameter name. In this case, the parameter opp3 corresponds to the field for Opportunity Name. For instructions on how to find the parameter name of a field visit: Decoding Salesforce.

Our Example

I used this exact technique when creating that ‘New’ button from our last tutorial.

Recall the formula we used for the ‘New’ button:

/006/e?retURL=%2F{!NULLVALUE(Contact.Id, Account.Id)}&accid={!Account.Id}&conid={!Contact.Id} &opp6={!Contact.LeadSource}&lookupcmpgn=1&opp3={!Account.Name} -

As you can see these are the parameters that we set:

• retURL=%2F{!NULLVALUE(Contact.Id, Account.Id)}
• accid={!Account.Id}
• conid={!Contact.Id}
• opp6={!Contact.LeadSource}
• lookupcmpgn=1
• opp3={!Account.Name} -

Let’s go through each in detail:

That’s basically the trick. We’re setting that Opportunity Name field through the URL. After the you implement the New button try it out and check out the URL. You’ll notice the Account Name is actually embedded into the URL.

Small Note: Some of you may be wondering why we don’t need the “na3.salesforce.com” in the URL formula. We’re using relative links and that basically means that the server and domain doesn’t change. In fact your browser will fill in that information automatically. I recommend using relative links in a formula. If Salesforce.com ever moved your organization on to a different server (from na3 to na2) then all the buttons and links you create won’t work.

More Uses of this Trick

This an incredibly helpful trick. You can merge information into fields and pass it through the URL just like I did. I’ll give you another scenario in which I used this trick. Let’s say you have a Sales Order object. A Sales Order is a child object to Account. So if you want the Sales Order to automatically ‘inherit’ information from the Account you can replace the ‘New’ button much the same way I did. For example, you may want the Order to be automatically pre-filled with the Account address whenever you create a new Sales Order.

Stay tuned, I have one more way in which this trick can be used.