Objects in Custom Subject Areas
This topic covers how you use the various types of objects in the Application Composer to create custom subject areas.
A custom subject area is a set of entities (objects), attributes, and measures that you use to build reports.
Objects can be classified under broad categories of custom objects and standard objects. Every custom subject area has a primary object, which is the focus of any reports that you create. You can also optionally add child objects to the custom subject area. Custom subject areas support both custom and standard objects. The objects that you create are called custom objects.
Before designing your custom subject area, use Intake Form Designer to identify or create the objects and fields that you want to use.
Primary Objects
A primary object is any top-level object. You create a custom subject area based on the primary object. Additionally, the primary object is the focus of the report that you create based on the custom subject area.
The list of available primary objects includes all objects, which are either top-level custom objects, or standard objects that are configured by the owning application. After you save your custom subject area, you can't change its primary object; but you can create another custom subject area using a different primary object.
Based on how you want to configure your custom subject area, you can add one child to an object.
Child Objects
A child object is an object that has a one-to-many relationship with a parent object and can be a parent object of another child object. Add a child object to a custom subject area if you want your report to include data from both the primary object and its children. If an object's parent object is already a child object (of another parent object) then the object is a grandchild object. For example, if object Y is a child of object X, and object Z is a child of object Y, then object Z is a grandchild of object X. Custom subject areas support parent-child-grandchild-great-grandchild objects.
You can only add one child object to the primary object per level, as long as there are child objects available. If there are no child objects for the chosen primary object, the list that enables selecting child objects does not appear.
The parent-child-grandchild-great-grandchild hierarchy supports adding up to three levels of child objects with one child object at each level; for example, parent-child1-child1.1-child1.1.1.