How do I accomplish this?

Question

Could anyone give me any tips to accomplish the following in Apex please?
I'm building a system to log maintenance requests. I've built a screen which allows the user to create a new maintenance request and put in a request description. This is recorded in a requests table.
I also want to maintain the history of a request in a seperate table (request_history). So for example, if a user adds a comment to a request, this is recorded in the request history table. A new record would be added to the history for each comment recorded.
So for example, a user creates a request. A record is created in the requests table. Later on they add a comment against the request. Afterwards this they add another comment against the request. So you end up with 1 record in the requests table, and 2 records in request_history (which hold the 2 additional comments).
When editing a request, I want the original request details (from the request table) to be displayed but not editable. Plus I want the 2 comments from request_history to be displayed, but again, not editable - in other words everything entered against the request is shown on screen. The user should only be able to add new comments against the request.
I'm a bit stumped as to how to accomplish this in Apex.. is there a type of page that would fit my needs.. or does anyone have a similar example they're created?

Answer 1

Hi Antilles
You're going to need several pages but all of them are easily doable within Apex.
1 - Main page - searchable report of existing requests. Each entry on the report would have a column link to the second page - this link would pass the REQUEST_ID value to that page to be used to filter its reports. There would also be an Add button to create a new request
2 - Request Summary page - this would contain your read-only data. The top half of the page would be a form based on the main table. The bottom half would be a normal report filtered on the same REQUEST_ID. There would also be an Add button to add a new comment. In this instance, you would probably create a page with Form and then add the report afterwards
3 - Request Creation page - called from the first page to allow for the create of a new request record
4 - Request comment creation page - called from the second page to create a new comment for the selected request.
These pages are very typical Apex pages and are quick to set up. If you need more detailed instructions, let us know
Andy