I don’t eat, sleep, and breathe Salesforce. In fact, I’d much rather be cooking than coding most of the time, problem is, I’m kind of obsessive about it. I spent a good portion of today practicing my knife skills, watching youtube videos and decimating a bag of potatoes.

I have a pot of black beans on, which is a LONG process at low temperature. I use this recipe from Serious Eats, because it’s easy, you don’t have to soak the beans over night, and it gives me a bunch of time to try other things. Like chopping potatoes. Okay, so I’m only obsessive about some parts. The chopping parts.

But I wasn’t just chopping potatoes today, I was also thinking about Salesforce, thinking about SOQL. Kieren Jameson, who I had the total honor of being recognized alongside for July Hub Heroes, wrote an absolutely stunning introduction to SOQL a few months ago called Cooking with Code and I highly recommend it.

As I was doing my own cooking and coding, I remembered a rarely mentioned but super great feature of SOQL that I wish more people would talk about, so I’m going to share it with you. I can’t make kitchen metaphors as well as Kieren, nor is this post super beginner friendly, but I was certainly inspired.

Recent Items?

You know that Recent Items sidebar…

And the autocompletes in global search…

Ever wondered how items get there? Ever wondered how YOUR objects can go there?

If your object has a Tab created with the Tab wizard, and you’re using the standard detail page, you’ll notice that your object is automatically showing up in both places when you look at a record. Even if you’ve overrode the detail page with a Visualforce page of your own choosing, because you’re using the standard controller, your object is still going to show up there.

But what about when you are using a custom controller? Deep in the throes of custom UI, or just building a lightning component (we’ll get a standard lightning controller someday, I’m sure of it!) you have resorted to a custom controller and now your object isn’t showing up in the sidebar anymore. You can try it yourself:

ContactViewer.vfp

<apex:page Controller="ContactViewerController">
	<h1>
    	This is {!c.Name}
	</h1>
</apex:page>

ContactViewerController.apxc

public class ContactViewerController {
    public Contact c {get;set;}

    public ContactLookerController() {
        c = [SELECT Name,Id 
        	 FROM Contact 
        	 WHERE Id =: ApexPages.currentPage().getParameters().get('id')];
    }
}

Now got to http://{your-instance}.salesforce.com/apex/ContactViewer?id={contactId}. Is your item in the sidebar? NOPE. Ugh.

That’s okay.

Let’s use FOR VIEW

Let’s make a slight change to our controller. After the WHERE clause in our query, let’s add FOR VIEW, like this:

ContactViewerController.apxc

public class ContactViewerController {
    public Contact c {get;set;}

    public ContactLookerController() {
        c = [SELECT Name,Id 
        	 FROM Contact 
        	 WHERE Id =: ApexPages.currentPage().getParameters().get('id')
        	 FOR VIEW];
    }
}

Now give your page a try…

BLAM, the contact shows up in the Recently Viewed Items sidebar! How sweet was that?

Learn more about FOR VIEW in the SOQL Docs and don’t lose this opportunity to check out it’s best friend, FOR REFERENCE, to be used when creating custom related lists.