Overview of Custom Objects

Custom objects allows administrators and developers to rapidly build and extend applications that support unique business processes.

By creating custom objects, you can seamlessly integrate organization-specific data with B2C Service, letting you manage and report on the data in the same way you manage and report on incidents, contacts, and other standard objects. Because custom object data is stored in the database, you can add custom objects to workspaces, desktop workflows, custom reports, and navigation sets.

Note: Building a complete custom object solution often requires creating different types of custom objects, including packages, objects, menu-only objects, and system attributes. For the sake of simplified discussion, these items are all referred to as custom objects in this documentation unless stated otherwise.

You can take your time when initially creating custom objects to ensure they are correct since they are not written to the database until you deploy them. In addition, since you can export custom objects and import them into other B2C Service sites, you can create, deploy, and test custom objects on a non-production site, export them, and then import them into your production site. See Deploy Custom Objects.

After deploying objects that have the appropriate option selected, workflow and workspace types are automatically created for them and additional profile permissions are made available. This lets your staff members work with custom objects exactly as they work with standard objects. For example, if you create and deploy an object to store product registration information, a new workspace type will be created that you can use to create new product registration workspaces. You can then add the workspace to your navigation set and edit your profile to grant permissions to manage product registration information. Standard reports are also automatically created for objects that have associated workflows and workspaces so you can quickly find specific custom object records and view the relationships between objects. See What to Do with Custom Objects After Deployment.