Standard Page - Different layout for new and edit

Question

I have a client that has had a highly customized org for a good deal of time and want to move back to much more standard pages, so they can have an internal SF admin, and no need to have someone familiar with Apex and VF. They really want a different layout for when you are adding a new contact, then when you are viewing or editing the contact. Basically, they want the add new contact screen to have a very limited amount of fields, then once the contact is created the view and edit page present the user with many more fields they can optionally update.

I have an idea on how to do this by creating a Record Type for each and using workflows to update the record type after the contact is created, but this seems pretty ugly and clunky to me.

Does anyone have a workaround for allowing different page layouts on add contact and view/edit contact using standard pages?

Answer 1

The answer to this question is in the question. Without record types, you have no way to change the page layout on the fly. Any editable field that is on the layout will be presented to the user, and there's no way to specify that a user doesn't have "create" access to a field but does have "update" access to the same field. Any other solution would involve code for maintenance, which is exactly what you're trying to avoid. The only other solution which is equally clunky would be to have a Visualforce page for the new record creation only, and have that page be controlled by custom settings that define the layout of the fields; this specifically means that the administrator would have to go to two different places to modify the behavior of the two pages.