What is the determining factor whether you should create a new object for something in your application? Examples: Lead vs. Application? Lead is a customer that has not committed yet (prospect) - somone you are trying to sell still. Am Application is a customer that has decided to move forward and apply for your service. Should they be 2 seperate objects/tabs or should that just be a different status? Another scenario is Applications vs. Commission Report - Once an application closes and the sale is complete the sales person needs to fill out there commission report. Should that just be a different view in the applications object/tab or should commission report be its own object/tab with a 1 to 1 relationship with each application? What are the pluses and minuses in keeping as much data/functions under 1 tab/object so you do not have to create so many complex relationships - is there something you could recommend for me to read that would give me better insight to this? I have always found
I'd say that tabs should be used for independent entities which make sense standing alone and do not need other records to support them. So Lead on my opinion should be a tab. Customer can be another tab. Lean can be converted into Customer through workflow process using data mapping (fully supported by Rollbase).
It also may help if you take a look at other apps built and published by Rollbase team. Check out our Application Directory.
I second Pavel's suggestion of looking at how some of the sample apps have been designed. For example, the CRM app shows how Leads, Contacts, Accounts and Opportunities are each separate objects with tabs, and how they interrelate via relationships.
Hope this helps
I suggest that the decision to expose an object as a tab by itself or to include it within the tab has to do with helping the user most easily see natural relationships between those objects. It might be helpful to group objects within a tab if the user would logically be aided in doing so. Also, grouping objects reduces the number of tabs, which might help the user focus on the whole of the application rather than being over whelmed by the component objects.
The Rollbase apps are well designed in that way, I think, and do offer a good set of examples to follow.