Written by Ale — Tagged with: Custom Links, Formulas, Script

From Salesforce’s Help&Training: “Your organization’s Administrator can set up Custom Links for Home, Campaigns, Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Cases, Contracts, Solutions, Products, Assets and Users. These Custom Links allow your organization to link salesforce.com data with your back-end office systems. They can be directed to external URLs or to your company’s intranet. In addition, the administrator can specify fields to be included as tokens within the URL. For example, you could include an account name in a URL that searches your accounts-payable system“.

These “tokens” are normally called Merge fields; “Merge fields serve as placeholders for data that will be replaced with information from your records, user information, or company information“.

Suggested trainings

• Getting Started
• Sample Buttons & Links

A simple web custom link

We can create a simple custom link to search on google.com for an account name:

http://www.google.com/search?q={!Account_Name}

where:

• http://www.google.com/search?q= is the URL we use to search on google;
• {!Account_Name} is the merge field for the account name.

We are ready now to create the custom link, so login to your Salesforce organization and:

1. Click on: Setup | App Setup | Customize | Accounts | Buttons and Links | New
2. Specify a Label (eg: “Google Account Name”)
3. The Name will be auto populated
4. Select the Display Type
5. Select the Behavior
6. Make sure the Content Source is URL
7. Copy&paste the custom link:
   http://www.google.com/search?q={!Account_Name}
8. Click Save

You can display all the available Merge fields by selecting the Object in the Select Field Type picklist, and the relative field in the Inster Field picklist.

The Link URL you enter can be up to 3000 bytes. When data is substituted for the tokens in the URL, the link may exceed 3000 bytes. Your browser may enforce additional limits for the maximum URL length. Maximum URL Length is 2083 Characters in Internet Explorer, not sure about Firefox, definitely more than 65536.

Update: the 2nd part of the tutorial is available here.

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