Creating Contact Objects Based on Field Data

[bdardin]

On our Project object, we have a Salesman picklist field, which just lists the last name of the salesman who sold the project. We have a Project Contact object on the Project. We want to use this Salesman field to automatically create a Project Contact looking up to the Contact record that corresponds to that salesman. Right now we're currently doing this by hardcoding the IDs of the contacts - which I understand is bad programming, but still works in production. I want to be able to do this without hardcoding the IDs, however I'm floundering over how to query just the salesmen contacts without having a huge OR statement in the where clause for all their last names, and how to then correctly grab the right salesman contact for each project in a for loop. I know I can't use a query inside the for loop. This sounds like something I'd use Maps for - is it possible to construct a Map where the last name as a String is the key and the Contact object (or ID) is the value? Or is there some other way I should do it? I'm an Apex (and programming in general) newbie. Thanks in advance!

[JeffM · Accepted solution]

You can build a Set<String> of the Contact Names you want to search, then SOQL from Contacts where LastName in :yourSet

This will give you a List<Contact>.  From there, if you wanted to create a Map<String, Contact>, or Map<String, Id> you can do something like 

for (Contact c : myList){

  myMap.put(c.LastName, c.Id);

}

[bdardin]

This worked! Thank you so much!