Show contact's related list on their account page - possible?

Question

The educational institution that I work for uses Salesforce primarily to track admissions/applications. Applicants have records in the 'contact' object and are under an account which is typically the highschool that they graduated from. On a contact's record, there is related list of their applications with us (their application is another object). What I would like to see, is a list of applicants by all of the students of any given highschool when viewing the highschool's record. Is this possible?

Thank you in advance for the help!

Answer 1

I think you are asking to see a related list of Application objects shown on the Account detail page.

You can do this by adding a lookup field to Account on your Application object and populating this using triggers with the Account ID found via the Contact. (That sort of trigger logic is a bit awkward to get right as you have to consider multiple scenarios.) You can also introduce formula fields on Application that duplicate fields from Contact such as "Name".

Then on your Account layout you will be able to add the Application object related list and include the attributes of Contact that you added formula fields for too. So this allows your UI to continue to use the simple and flexible to configure layout-based UI for Account.

Answer 2

I'm assuming the Application has some sort of lookup to a Highschool.

1) You can create a link to the appropriate report on the page.

2) You can embed a VF page that essentially shows that report. (This is the only solution that lets you see the data directly in that page.)

3) Show the related list of Applicants. This won't show all of them unless you click the Show full list button which would take you to another page.

Answer 3

In addition to the other solutions that have been offered, depending on how you have the High School records catalogued/stored in your database (are they contact Records, part of a custom Object, are the contacts of a particular Record Type, or only contained as a field in your individual Student's Contact records?), you could create either an additional Custom Object that's a lookup to Contacts which stores records of High Schools only, then use a junction object to find the intersection of the High Schools with the look-ups to the Student Contact Records where they match each of the High Schools.

Alternatively, you may want to forego the custom object for High Schools and go with a junction object that you periodically use to run a query to find your matches. Its all a matter of how you choose to architect this and how "up to date" you'd like it to keep itself without needing to maintain it.

I did something similar once on a project where the first solution was what we chose to go with for the sake of maintainability.