Dot-walking

Let's say we have two custom objects in the ACME's ITSM application:

Employee: Contains information about employees, including their name and department.

Department: Stores details about departments, such as department name and location.

• These two objects are related as follows:
• Each employee is associated with a department through a lookup relationship.
• Each department can have multiple employees.

Now, suppose we want to retrieve the location of the department that an employee belongs to using dot walking. 

Here's how we would do it in Apex:

// Assuming 'emp' is an instance of the Employee object

// We want to retrieve the location of the department the employee belongs to

String departmentLocation = emp.Department__r.Location__c;

In this example:

• emp is an instance of the Employee object.
• Department__r refers to the lookup relationship between Employee and Department.
• Location__c is a field on the Department object containing the location information.

By using dot walking (Department__r.Location__c), we can directly access the location of the department associated with the employee without needing to perform additional queries or lookups. This makes the code concise and efficient.

Sam the Application Designer wants to select the fields of the parent table & the related tables based on dot-walking concept, as described in the above section.

Sam can define the conditions either on the fields of the transaction table or on the related tables using the dot-walking concept as shown in the below screenshot.