The Quick View Tab

Lots of people would love to have a tab that just opens directly to a view of their choice.  Unfortunately, standard object tabs can only open the relevant standard overview page, which shows a list of recently viewed cases -- that page can't be preset to open a certain view as soon as you hit the tab.  However, you can create a custom tab which will instantly redirect itself to the view you'd like.  Here's how.

The most common request I get is to create a tab for views on Case, so that's the example I'll give here.  Of course, this technique can be used to create a tab for any kind of view for any object.

First, navigate to the view you'd like to tab-ify by going to the overview page and selecting that view.  In my case, I'll go to the Cases tab and click on the Open Cases view, which is a view I created that shows all the open cases in my org. 

Save the URL of this view; you'll need it later.  It will look something like 

https://na1.salesforce.com/500?fcf=00B300000031l4H

Now go to Setup->Customize->Create->Tabs.  Click the New button under Web Tabs.  Set it to Full Page Width.  Set the Tab Type to URL, and give it a label that makes sense (I called mine "Open Cases" but you can call yours "Cases" if you intend to hide the normal case tab -- just make sure you don't end up with 2 tabs labelled "Cases").  Pick any Tab Style -- it's going to redirect to the Case tab anyway so this doesn't matter.

On the next page of the wizard, enter the following in the Button or Link URL:

javascript:parent.navigateToUrl('<your url here>');

Don't forget those single-quotes around the URL.  So in my example it looks like this:

javascript:parent.navigateToUrl('https://na1.salesforce.com/500?fcf=00B300000031l4H');

And voila!  You now have a tab that navigates directly to your view.

Bear in mind that a quick JavaScript navigation of this sort breaks the Back button minorly -- if you click this tab and then hit the back button, you'll get bounced right back to your view.  You have to click the Back button twice in rapid succession to get back where you started.  Consider yourself warned!