Custom list view in Custom Object page

Question

I have created a News custom object in my sandbox which appears in my Customer Portal via a tab. This object contains two custom fields Title and Content.

Now what I would like is to display a list of news titles along with their post date on the News tab and then by clicking on a row it will show them the News details page which just shows them all the data for that news item.

Initially, it used to show a default list which only contained the News item auto number which was linked to the detailed page. I created a new view which actually lists the News item Title and the Created Date; however, by doing this, on this view there is no link to view the detail page. How can I get this link back on my new list? Also, how can I predefine which order this list will be displayed in (and make it non user sortable)?

Answer 1

Using the default presentation mechanisms, only the object's Name field is presented with a hyperlink (that makes use of the object's ID). So to get that link back you just need to put back the auto-number field (which I assume is the Name field). There is no ability to control the default sort of remove the sorting. The positive of using these default mechanisms is that your tab behaves like many other tabs which is usually helpful for users.

If more specific behaviour is important to you, you can write your own Visualforce list page based on the StandardSetController and override the object's tab action to use that page. Then you can hyperlink whichever field you like and lock down the sort order.