we are migrating to Service Cloud from an old legacy system. Our product data is very big, and cumbersome (and can't be improved in the near term).

this makes the data definitions more problematic.. we have 400 serviceable products, many releases per product, and the development shop creates a very discreet product definition package, with  specific supportable parts. overall we have some 50,000 supportable software parts.

Our old system hid all this part detail from our users thru the use of specially named and configured queues, product-region-severity.. so there are over 800 of them too.  and u can only see one queues contents at a time.

with SC we can fix this outbound part, using the case view definition (we call it filter) and the console or console2 UIs which drive off the view/filter definition.

so far so good..

but the view editor has some quirks..  to get the magnifying glass to get a list to select from, the data has to be a picklist.. and a picklist can only have 200 elements before the UI starts to put up error messages.. we have 400 products..

if you select 'product', you don't get a view list, you have to type the 'name'.. which in our case is some 40-90 characters long. nobody will get that right.

and we need below product, down to these 'parts'..  but the view editor can't related two fields together (the subparts of A product are smaller than ALL the parts of ALL the products, dependant picklist style)..

so, lots of issues..

so, we 'could' create a different UI for doing this view definition with VF.. but, unfortunately, there is no customer api to the view definition data object to

'save' it, or recall it for later editing. best we can tell, there is no intent to provide this api..

so.. can I get access to this page with UrlFor()? and then stuff the fields that way?  anyone ever tried this? 

all the other technical choices provide really bad options for our users, and they will reject the new system somthing fierce.

(someone just made a java gui that does this new ui over the old system..with over 50% of our user population on the new tool,  so it will be a BIG setback)..

I know that I could write my own console app too, using a new data layout for the filter definition, but thats a LONG way down the custom code path I didn't want to go (integrate telephony, knowledge search, the new tabbing format, etc.. )

anybody ever try this urlfor() approach for views? search doesn't get me to any examples or other complaints..

thanks