Custom 'new' button to create child record and set saveURL to parent

Question

What i want to do should be easy to do via URL hack, but looking at legitimate ways of doing this. I want to create a child invoice line item from parent invoice and set the save url to the parent invoice.

I had the thought of approaching it using URLFOR and $Action but can't even get it to set the parent id. Saw some old threads on success that indicated you could pass the field IDs as parameters but system won't allow for save, and this seems little different from URL hack. Can't find any docs on what url parameters, if any, are officially supported on $action.

So, then, what is the supported means of doing this? Do I have to replace the line item page w a vf page and use an extension to override the save behavior? Is there a simpler supported means of doing this?

Answer 1

I recommend that you keep in mind that URL hacks are going away. A year or two years at most from now, they'll likely be gone entirely. So, if looking at the "big picture", you genuinely want to avoid using URL hacks as someone will have to come in behind you at some point and fix them.

That being said, if you also want to set a URL linking the child to the parent, in my experience, I've typically done that using a trigger, but then I don't know what kind of "child" record you're trying to create as there are different kinds of "children". If it's a M-D detail record, it's very different than if it's a related record that's a child of the parent record. The latter requires an insert of the new child record followed by an update of the parent record to link it to the child if you want to have cross-references that explicitly link the two.

If you're trying to create a record that you want to save on the parent's detail record page, that's an entirely different story and it's unclear to me exactly which it is you wish to do since you've not included code showing what's you've tried that didn't work for you or a flow diagram of the objects involved.