1. A method, comprising: receiving at a platform supporting applications built by third parties, at least one programming language instruction associated with at least one custom object, the at least one custom object including a table of a database; determining a shape for the at least one custom object based upon a runtime instance of the at least one custom object, the shape indicated by a number of rows and columns of the table; and generating, based on the at least one programming language instruction, a set of instructions to an on-demand database service, the set of instructions configured to operate upon the runtime instance of the at least one custom object based upon the shape; wherein the shape is determined utilizing one or more tokens; wherein each of the tokens indicates a row of the table and a type of the row of the table, and the one or more tokens are utilized for indicating the shape associated with the at least one custom object.