Custom report types in Salesforce provide a structured framework within the report wizard, enabling users to create and tailor reports to their needs. By leveraging the relationships, whether master-detail or lookup, between objects, custom report types offer the following capabilities:
- Selection of specific objects for display to users during report creation and customization.
- Definition of the relationships between the displayed objects, facilitating comprehensive data analysis.
- Ability to designate which fields of the chosen objects can be utilized as columns in the generated reports.
Custom Report Types
- Navigate to Setup and type “Report Types” in the Quick Find box.
- Select “Report Types” from the search results.
- If the Custom Report Type welcome page appears, click on “Continue” to proceed.
Click New Custom Report Type.
- Select the Primary Object for your custom report type
- Enter the required fields.
When finished, use the Venn diagram to define which related records from other objects are returned in report results.
Add child objects to the custom report type
To incorporate additional data sources into your custom report type beyond the primary object, follow these steps:
- Click on the box below the primary object.
- Choose a child object from the available options, which are limited to related objects.
- The primary object’s name is derived from its plural label field, while related objects are named based on either their related list label field or the custom field defining their relationship to the primary object.
- For each selected child object, specify one of the following criteria:
- Require each “A” record to have at least one related “B” record. Only parent records with child records will be displayed in the report.
- Allow “A” records to have or not have related “B” records. Parent records will be shown regardless of whether they have child records.
- You can add up to three child objects, but the actual number may vary depending on the selected objects.
- Save your changes.
- If you choose the option where “A” may or may not have “B” records, subsequent objects included in the custom report type will automatically inherit the same association.
- In cases where object A lacks object B, blank fields will appear in the report results for object B. For instance, if a user runs a report on Accounts with or without Contacts, Contact fields will be blank for accounts without contacts.
In this example below, loan is the custom object which is treated as the primary object. For objects to appear as child objects, you should first create a look up field in that child object. Here, in the Account object, there is a look up field to Loan custom object. Similarly in Contact object has two look up fields, one each to Account and Loan object. If you enable activities when creating a custom object, the activity related lists are added to the default page layout automatically. If you enable activities later, after the custom object already exists, you must add the related lists to the page layout manually.
Click Save.
To learn more, click Set Up a Custom Report Type (salesforce.com)
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