Add field in page layout and create a profile using apex metadata api about apex-mdapi HOT 1 CLOSED

RE: Layouts. This is quite involved, but you can get the main parts of the process by referring to the Retrieve and Deploy demo VF pages and controllers, combine the logic in both of these and place in the middle code to read the layout via the Apex XML library and emit the new XML (via toXmlString() method) to deploy.

RE: Profiles. This in theory would be much the same process as above. However, the Salesforce Metadata API, makes it very hard to retrieve complete Profiles needed to implement such code. If you retrieve a Profile it is only partially complete depending on what else you retrieved, such as custom objects, fields, pages, classes etc. Meaning that in order to get permissions on such things included in the retrieve you also need to retrieve these items, which blows the 3MB callout response limit in Apex wide open.

I would recommend looking at the Permission Set API, which allows you to read Profile owned Permission Sets, from this you can create a new Permission Set (not profile owned). And then assign that to users. This is not the same as cloning a Profile, but has broadly the same effect and moves you closer to the much more flexible Permission Set based approach for managing permissions in an org.

from apex-mdapi.