Salesforce Child Record Data Visualizer v0.9

We’ve all being there trying to open that grand child record of an Account to then have dozens of tabs open! It is a pain and can get confusing. With this target problem, of visualizing child records I decided to try and throw my hat into the problem.

As someone that likes simplicity, and is a bit impatient, I realized that the best solution for this one would be to make an LWC, a supporting Apex class and a metadata object to hold any, well, metadata to speed up the process for users. The custom metadata is as follows:

Quite minimal, with the most important bit being the Object Related Objects field. It is a Long Text field and acts as a list of all of the objects related separated by enter.

The LWC itself will simply display the structure of the objects and records. When the user clicks the individual object then the records will be displayed. Users can also ‘drill’ and get that object’s children. This is in my opinion the least cluttered way of simply showing all child objects and not be overloaded.

Here we display all records with what is likely the most common fields, Name and Id. Below we can see the space showing the object structure and some… jankiness happening.

Now, given the version on the title, you will be able to tell that on this first attempt I am not done. There isn’t even a line to show the object relations! Salesforce without automation! I have not even automated the metadata creation yet! (blood curdling scream)
So let’s see what I did complete:
1. Created the Metadata
2. Created the data display
3. Created the object structure display
The last point being quite a painful step, but here is a quick gif demo!

Why was it painful, looks kind of easy and ugly? Well, I used a canvas, which meant that I was working with pixel coordinates in JS. Remember that I am keeping things quite simple. Which kept giving me a variety of issues, with the clicking being the most significant. As the keen eyed of you noticed, when clicking there is quite a gap between the activation and actual rectangle.

So what’s next? Do I drop this side thing? Learn to bake? Start a bakery? Actually be happy? Run for mayor and make a positive change? No, what am I? Normal? While the clicking and the canvas has definitely given me a variety of issues; I am close to something presentable! So I’ll keep going and do a couple of more fixes. Such as having the metadata be automated with a button. Sacrifice a goat to fix the clicking. Draw the line showing the relation. If possible, have a way to just drill down multiple object levels. That last one might be a v1.1 thing, who knows!

p.s. Once I get to the v1.0 I will explain what is going on, I just felt that I had to say something about where I am.