Salesforce Lightning Experience Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Guide
Oglas
Oglas
The Lightning Experience Guide
How to Transition to the New Salesforce
Version 5, Summer '17
Written by
Michael Alderete
Michelle Chapman-Thurber
Chris Duarte
With contributions by
Jennifer Crabtree
Cate deHeer
Brian Donnelly
Chalon Emmons
Carol Franger
Justine Heritage
Michael Hoban
Dave Jacowitz
Tammy Rahn
Samantha Ready
Erin Tidwell
Lance Santin
Jillian West
Emily Wilska
Ari Langer
This book is intended for administrators and developers who want to learn about and migrate to Salesforce's new Lightning Experience. To help you get familiar with
Lightning Experience, we take you through a virtual tour of its features and functionality, and give you suggestions on how to roll it out in your organization. In addition, we’ve included information for developers about how Lightning Experience changes the way you develop applications, as well as detailed information about
Visualforce in Lightning Experience.
The Lightning Experience Guide
©
Copyright 2000–2017 salesforce.com, inc. All rights reserved. Salesforce is a registered trademark of salesforce.com, inc., as are other names and marks. Other marks appearing herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Various trademarks held by their respective owners.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.
CONTENTS
WELCOME TO LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE
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Chapter 1: What Your Sales and Service Teams Need
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Welcome to Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
What About the Previous User Experience?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Chapter 2: What Makes Lightning Experience So Special
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Take a Tour of Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Chapter 3: Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Does My Org Qualify for Lightning Experience?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Comparing Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Other Features That Aren’t Supported
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
What About Apex and Visualforce?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Evaluate Your Org with the Lightning Experience Readiness Check
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Best Use Cases for Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Preview Your Org in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Chapter 4: Your Lightning Experience Rollout Strategy
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Recommended Features for Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Set Up Users for Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Switching Between Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
WHAT'S NEW IN LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Chapter 5: Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
The Lightning Experience Navigation Bar
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
The App Launcher in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Meet the New and Improved Setup
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Contents
Lightning Experience Help Menu
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Chapter 6: Opportunities, Leads, and Selling in Lightning Experience
Explore the Opportunity Workspace
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
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Chapter 7: Explore More of Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
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Object Home Pages and List Views
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
How Other Objects are Organized in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Chatter in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Chapter 8: Reports and Dashboards in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Report and Dashboard Home Pages
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Create Beautiful Dashboards Using a Feature-Rich Editor
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Present and Share Information in Interactive Dashboards
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Get More Information from Interactive Charts and Filters on the Report Run Page
Reports and Dashboards: Compatibility Between Lightning Experience and Salesforce
HOW YOUR EXISTING CUSTOMIZATIONS AFFECT LIGHTNING
EXPERIENCE
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Chapter 9: Your Layouts Can Customize Lightning Experience Records
Page Layouts in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
Compact Layouts in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Chapter 10: Actions and Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Actions in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
How Actions Are Ordered in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
CREATE LIGHTNING APPS
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Chapter 11: What Is a Lightning App?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Contents
Navigate at the Speed of Lightning
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
Find Items and Apps in the App Launcher
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Meet the Lightning Experience App Manager
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Install a Custom Classic App: The Warehouse Data Model
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Chapter 12: Step into the World of Lightning Apps
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
Tips for Creating Apps in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Chapter 13: Take Your Classic App to the Next Level: Lightning
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Give the Warehouse App That Touch of Lightning
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
CREATE CUSTOM PAGES FOR LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE
Chapter 14: Meet the Lightning App Builder
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
How the Lightning App Builder Works
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
The Lightning App Builder User Interface
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Chapter 15: Yes, Virginia, You Can Customize Your Lightning Experience Home
Page
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Roll Out Your Custom Home Page to Your Lightning Experience Users
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
Chapter 16: Those Lightning Experience Record Pages? You Can Customize
Them, Too!
Create a Custom Lightning Record Page
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
Roll Out Your Custom Record Page to Your Lightning Experience Users
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
Chapter 17: The App Home Lightning Page
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
Add Your App Page to Lightning Experience and the Salesforce app
Contents
Test Your App Page in the Salesforce App
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Test Your App Page in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
MIGRATE JAVASCRIPT BUTTON FUNCTIONALITY TO
LIGHTNING
Chapter 18: JavaScript Buttons: It’s Time to Move On
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
JavaScript Button Security Issues and Use Cases
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
Chapter 19: You Have Buttons? We Have Alternatives
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
Chapter 20: Lightning Actions: Smart, Fast, and Mobile
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Populate Fields Based on User Input and Provide Feedback Messages to Users
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
ROLL OUT LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE
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Chapter 21: Welcome to Your Lightning Experience Rollout
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
Educate Yourself About Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
Get Hands-On with Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Identify Stakeholders and an Executive Sponsor
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Educate Your Company About Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
How to Demonstrate Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
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Chapter 22: All Systems Go
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
Contents
Decide How to Structure Your Rollout
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
Unleash the Power of Super Users
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
Create a Chatter Group for the Rollout Team
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Create a Marketing and Communication Strategy
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Test Your Customizations and Iterate
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
Chapter 23: Go Live
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Use Reports and Dashboards in Salesforce
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE DEVELOPMENT
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
Chapter 24: User Interface Development Considerations
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
Raising the Bar for Web App User Interfaces
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
Visualforce as a JavaScript Application Container
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
Choosing the Right Tool for the Job
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Choosing the Right Tool for Your Organization
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
Migrating to Lightning Components
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Chapter 25: Visualforce and Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
What Works, but Needs Updating and Testing
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
Contents
Chapter 26: Lightning Components in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
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Chapter 27: Salesforce Partners, Packaging, and AppExchange
Partner Tools in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
Packaging Apps in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
AppExchange and Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
Chapter 28: Understand Changes to Other Development Tools
Installed Packages in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
The API and Apex in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
Authentication and Security in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
Canvas for Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
Salesforce Mobile for Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
Mobile SDK for Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
VISUALFORCE & LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
Chapter 29: Use Visualforce in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
Where You Can Use Visualforce in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Chapter 30: Developing Visualforce Pages for Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
Viewing Visualforce Pages During Development
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
Reviewing Visualforce Pages in Multiple Environments
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
Testing Your Visualforce Pages
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
Chapter 31: Exploring the Visualforce App Container
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
The Outer Lightning Experience Container
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
Visualforce Defaults and Environment Changes in Lightning Experience
<apex:page> showHeader and sidebar Attributes Are Always false
The sforce.one JavaScript Utility Object
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
Contents
Chapter 32: Sharing Visualforce Pages Between Classic and Lightning
Experience
Detecting and Responding to the User Experience Context in Visualforce Markup
Detecting and Responding to the User Experience Context in JavaScript
Determining the User Experience Context in Apex
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
Querying for Lightning Experience via SOQL and API Access
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
Chapter 33: Managing Navigation
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
Navigation in Lightning Experience
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
Classic Visualforce Navigation
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
Navigation Gotchas, and How to Fix Them
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
Chapter 34: Understanding Important Visual Design Considerations
Affecting the Styling of Standard Components
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
Styling Strategies and Recommendations
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
The Salesforce Lightning Design System
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
Chapter 35: Knowing Which Features to Avoid in Lightning Experience
Lightning Experience Header and Navigation Menu Can’t Be Suppressed
Salesforce Classic Header and Sidebar Are Always Suppressed
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
<apex:relatedList> and Blacklisted Related Lists
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
No, Really, Don’t Set window.location Directly
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
sforce.one Isn’t Salesforce Mobile-Only
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
INDEX
WELCOME TO LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE
CHAPTER 1
What Your Sales and Service Teams
Need
In this chapter ...
•
•
Your sales and service reps have needs. They need good data in Salesforce so they can find just-in-time information about their customers and prospects. They need to work in Salesforce with as few clicks as possible, so they can sell and deliver service faster and smarter. And they need the ability to do things themselves, without having to come to you, the
Salesforce admin, for every request.
Your sales reps need these things so they can spend their time where it matters most: selling your company’s product and crushing their numbers.
Your service reps (or maybe you call them support agents) need these things so they can spend their time where it counts: helping your company’s customers and answering questions quickly.
So how do you help your sales and service teams get what they need?
1
Chapter 1 What Your Sales and Service Teams Need
Welcome to Lightning Experience
Welcome to Lightning Experience, the modern, beautiful user experience from Salesforce. With a sales-and service-centric mindset, we focused on reinventing the desktop environment to better support your business processes. The result is an intuitive, intelligent interface that helps sales and service teams work more naturally and more productively.
Although we started with sales, Lightning Experience doesn’t end there. Besides transforming Salesforce
CRM, Lightning Experience also extends to service, apps, platform, and more. No matter what department you're in, we understand that the way people work is changing.
All this change is greatly influenced by the rise of mobile. Sales reps at your company are already using mobile to research prospective customers, get directions to client meetings, connect socially with customers, and more. We get that. That’s why Lightning Experience takes the cool stuff from the Salesforce mobile experience and brings it to the desktop.
What reps love about mobile… …becomes what reps love about desktop
When we’re talking about Lightning Experience, we’re talking about pages in Salesforce that are optimized for sales and service use. We’re talking about new features that help your sales and service teams focus on the right deals, the right customers, and the right activities, every time users log in. We’re talking about flexible, interactive tools that help everyone visualize data and take care of business.
But before we go any further, let’s talk about how Lightning Experience got its name, and why we built it in the first place.
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Chapter 1 What Your Sales and Service Teams Need
Why We Built Lightning Experience
Let’s start with the name, and while we’re at it, the correct spelling of the name.
It’s Lightning!
Not Lightening Or Lighting
A modern, productivity-boosting user experience designed to help sales and service reps close deals and support customers lightning fast (see what I did there?)
The act of becoming lighter, like when you put down that swag-stuffed backpack you’re carrying at Dreamforce
The method by which something is illuminated, like the soft glow of a lamp, by the light of which you read the release notes
So why the name “Lightning?” Well, think for a moment about actual lightning, the kind you see during a storm. Think about how fast it strikes; if you blink, you might miss it. Think about how beautiful it is; lightning can be stunning to behold. Finally, think about how unique each lightning bolt is; no two are the same.
That’s a lot like Lightning Experience. It’s fast, it’s beautiful, and it’s unique to each sales and service user.
It’s a simpler user experience, designed to help your sales team sell faster, with personalized alerts and an interactive assistant to keep sales reps focused on what’s important. It’s designed to help service reps support customers faster, bringing cases, knowledge, and support tools together in an efficient, problem-solving environment. All of this drives improved productivity for everyone in your org.
Ultimately, we built Lightning Experience because of you, our customer. Lightning Experience is the result of everything we’ve learned from you over the past years and releases. Lightning Experience is the killer sales and service app you can deliver to your teams.
What About the Previous User Experience?
It’s still here, and for the purposes of clarity, we’re calling it Salesforce Classic.
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Chapter 1 What Your Sales and Service Teams Need
When we say Salesforce Classic, we’re talking about the venerable Salesforce interface that immediately predates Lightning Experience. It’s the one with the Force.com App Menu and the user name, Setup, and
Help links in the top right corner of the header. If you haven’t customized your logo, you also see the seasonal Salesforce logo in the upper left corner.
We understand that you might not be ready to move off Salesforce Classic just yet. Depending on your company culture and size, change can take time. To help you manage the transition, we’ve made it easy for you to fire up Lightning Experience and keep Salesforce Classic around too. So you can ease your users over to the new way of doing things. We’ll talk more about developing a phased rollout plan and change management in another module, since that’s an important topic all on its own.
But now that you may be dealing with two Salesforce interfaces, you need to know how to tell when you’re in one or the other.
The Force.com App Menu in the top right means you’re in Salesforce Classic
Icons in the top right mean you’re in
Lightning Experience
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Chapter 1 What Your Sales and Service Teams Need
It’s important that you get comfortable with telling the two experiences apart so you’re ready to help users with questions. After you enable Lightning Experience, one of the first things you’ll need to identify on a troubleshooting call with a user is, are they in Lightning Experience or in Salesforce Classic?
Now let’s talk about the benefits you get once you deploy Lightning Experience.
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CHAPTER 2
What Makes Lightning Experience So
Special
In this chapter ...
•
With all its new features and redesigned pages, there are many key benefits to using Lightning Experience. We won’t cover everything here, but for each area of the product, we’ll highlight some of the neatest things.
To kick things off, let’s talk about some of the highlights:
•
Efficient navigation and the ability to switch between custom-branded apps
•
Quick access to productivity tools like Notes and Recent Items in the utility bar
•
New record layouts that focus on what you can do instead of what you can view
•
Turbocharged list views that let you easily filter and visualize your data
•
Beautiful dashboards with components that span both columns and rows
•
Sleek report views that you can filter quickly to see the data that's most important to you
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Chapter 2 What Makes Lightning Experience So Special
Take a Tour of Lightning Experience
Why is Lightning Experience so special? We’ll show you!
Home
We’ve reimagined the way you start your day with a brand new, intelligent page. Now your sales reps can monitor their performance to goal and get insights on their key accounts. Plus, we’ve added an Assistant, which is your users’ action list of things to do. You can also use the Lightning App Builder to create custom
Home pages that appear for different profiles.
•
Start your day fast with a customizable, intelligent page.
•
Use the Performance Chart to monitor how close you are to crushing your numbers.
•
See relevant, timely news articles about customers, partners, and competitors with News.
•
See upcoming meetings and tasks due today.
•
Use the Assistant to identify key issues to work on today.
•
Focus your selling activities on your Top Deals.
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Chapter 2 What Makes Lightning Experience So Special
Opportunity Workspace
We’ve taken your sales process and put it into an action-optimized workspace, designed to help your sales reps work their deals faster and smarter. You can customize coaching scripts for each step in the sales process, create records quickly with fewer clicks, and ultimately close deals faster.
•
Showcase key record details in the new highlights panel at the top of the page.
•
Use the handy composer to quickly log calls, create tasks, send emails, and more.
•
Get key coaching details with a customizable Path to support your sales process.
•
See a wealth of related information on hover using quick view, without ever leaving the opportunity page.
•
Add related records—like contacts—in context with minimal clicks.
•
View relevant, timely news about the account the opportunity’s associated with.
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Chapter 2 What Makes Lightning Experience So Special
Accounts and Contacts
Like with opportunities (and leads), we’ve optimized the layout for accounts and contacts, organizing the content by their primary use case: reference. Now your sales and service reps can find information and gather information at a glance.
•
Locate important data efficiently with the redesigned Lightning Experience page layout.
•
Get the latest news for your customers with News and integrated Twitter.
•
Work smarter and keep your data clean with field-level duplicate matching.
•
Review past and upcoming activities at a glance.
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Chapter 2 What Makes Lightning Experience So Special
Reports and Dashboards
Your users will love the ability to create their own filters on reports. You will appreciate the updated dashboard editor, which features components that span both columns and rows.
•
Create filters while viewing a report.
•
Make visually awesome dashboards with more than three columns.
•
Transition easily from Salesforce Classic to Lightning Experience with reports and dashboards that are automatically viewable in the new interface. And they inherit all permissions and sharing settings that were defined in Salesforce Classic.
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Chapter 2 What Makes Lightning Experience So Special
List Views
Now your sales and service reps can visualize any list view graphically with a handy chart, or easily apply filters to narrow the results.
•
Visualize your data in seconds with list view charts, and quickly create filters to slice your data how you want.
•
Create list views by using Lightning Experience’s intuitive filters panel.
•
Use type-ahead search to find a favorite list view fast.
•
Automatically open your list views created in Salesforce Classic from Lightning Experience.
•
Use inline editing to make quick changes to records in a list view.
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Chapter 2 What Makes Lightning Experience So Special
Kanban View
The Kanban view organizes a set of records into columns to track your work at a glance. To update a record’s status, drag it into a different column. You can configure the board by selecting what fields columns and summaries are based on. And, get personalized alerts on key opportunities in flight.
•
Visualize your work at each stage or status
•
Move records between columns using drag and drop functionality
•
Configure columns and summary fields on the fly
•
Edit or delete records to keep them up to date
•
Quickly create filters to slice your data how you want
•
For opportunities, get alerts to notify you when action is needed on a key deal
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Chapter 2 What Makes Lightning Experience So Special
1. The records in the Kanban view are based on the selected list view.
2. Easily toggle between the list view grid view and the Kanban view.
3. Filter your records to view a particular subset of your records.
4. Select which record type to view.
5. Columns are created based on the grouping field.
6. Quickly move a record to a different column by dragging the card.
7. For opportunities, alerts tell how to keep a deal on track, for example, create a task or event.
Console Apps
Minimize clicks and scrolling for your sales and service reps so they can quickly find, update, and create records. A Lightning console app is a tab-based workspace that lets users manage multiple records on a single screen. Take advantage of the standard Lightning console apps for Sales and Service to support your fast-paced environment.
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Chapter 2 What Makes Lightning Experience So Special
Other Highlights
•
Make your users more efficient and allow them to switch between apps that you can brand and customize. Create records and access recent records and lists for certain items directly from the navigation bar.
•
See open tasks, planned meetings, and accomplishments in the activity timeline on each opportunity, lead, account, and contact.
•
Find your tasks on a new page for tasks, including the new master-detail view, which lets you see a single task and your entire list of tasks side by side.
•
Use phone features without ever leaving Salesforce. Make and receive calls, add call notes, and log call information with ease.
•
Send email through Gmail or Office 365 accounts with your Salesforce email. And see the emails you’ve sent in your Gmail or Office 365 Sent Items folder for seamless integration.
•
Take better notes with auto-save, rich text capabilities, inline images, and versioning. Relate a note to multiple records and share notes with teammates or Chatter groups.
•
Enjoy a richer file preview experience that doesn’t require Adobe Flash Player.
•
Find records faster with improved global search, which includes top results and recent records.
As you can see, there’s a lot of rad stuff that you get with Lightning Experience. Next, we’ll take you through the key differences between Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic, to help you figure out how you’ll make the transition.
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CHAPTER 3
Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
In this chapter ...
•
Does My Org Qualify for Lightning
•
•
•
What About Apex and Visualforce?
•
Evaluate Your Org with the Lightning
•
•
Lightning Experience is a modern user interface that helps your sales reps sell faster and your service reps support customers more productively.
Lightning Experience includes many new features and entirely redesigned pages, but not every Salesforce feature is supported in Lightning
Experience. So the Salesforce experience you’ve known to date—called
Salesforce Classic—is still available for you, and the users you enable for
Lightning Experience can switch between the two at will.
As your company’s trusted advisor for Salesforce, you need to help your company decide when to enable Lightning Experience. So, we’ve got to start getting you educated on Lightning Experience features versus
Salesforce Classic.
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Does My Org Qualify for Lightning Experience?
Let’s look at the supported editions and user licenses to see if you can enable and use Lightning Experience.
Supported Editions
Table 1: Salesforce Editions
Unsupported Editions
•
Group Edition
•
Essentials Edition
•
Professional Edition
•
Enterprise Edition
•
Performance Edition
•
Unlimited Edition
•
Developer Edition
•
Personal Edition
•
Contact Manager Edition
•
Database.com Edition
•
Chatter.com Edition
Table 2: Salesforce User Licenses
Supported Licenses
•
Salesforce
•
All Salesforce Platform and Force.com
(excluding Force.com Free)
•
Identity User
•
Company (Employee) Community
•
Chatter External
•
Chatter Plus
•
Chatter Free
Unsupported Licenses
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Force.com Free
Work.com
Database.com
Content Only
Ideas Only
Knowledge Only
Site.com Only
Important: To learn about browser options and limitations for Lightning Experience, see Supported
Browsers for Lightning Experience in the Salesforce Help.
If your org still uses Internet Explorer 11, be aware that we’re in the process of retiring support for this browser. There are significant performance issues when running Lightning Experience in IE11.
Even if you opt into the extended support option for IE11, we recommend migrating your users to an alternate modern browser like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge as soon as possible.
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Comparing Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Understanding what you get in the new interface is a big part of the decision to switch to Lightning
Experience. Here are some highlights of how Lightning Experience compares to what you’re used to in
Salesforce Classic, including features that are available in the new interface only.
Note:
This isn’t a comprehensive list of supported and unsupported features. For a more detailed list, see the Salesforce Help .
Salesforce Data
Feature
Sales objects: Accounts, Campaigns, Contacts,
Contracts, Leads, Opportunities, Orders, Person
Accounts, Price Books, Products, Quotes
Calendar, Events, Tasks
Lightning Experience
Service objects: Assets, basic Cases, Lightning
Knowledge, Work Orders
Custom objects
Chatter feeds, groups, and people
Salesforce Files
Other Sales and Service objects
Salesforce Classic
Home
An intelligent page filled with insights, a slick performance chart, and a helpful assistant feature, highlighting what’s most important each day.
Lightning Experience Salesforce Classic Feature
Performance chart
Assistant
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Feature
News
Top deals
Tasks
Events
1
Calendar
1
Feed and publisher
Items to approve
Customizable dashboards
Customizable home page components
Lightning Experience Salesforce Classic
1
In Lightning Experience, Home displays only events remaining on a user's calendar today. Users can access all their events from the Calendar tab in the navigation bar.
Accounts and Contacts
Sales and service reps get a layout designed to help them find the information they need, fast.
Lightning Experience Salesforce Classic Feature
News
Activity timeline
Notes
“Reference” page layout
Related lists
Integrated email and templates
Twitter highlights
Person accounts
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Feature
Account teams
Account hierarchy
Contact hierarchy
Find and merge duplicate accounts and contacts
Matching and duplicate rules for business accounts, person accounts, and contacts
Lightning Experience Salesforce Classic
Opportunities and Leads
Sales reps in Lightning Experience find a turbo-charged workspace for managing opportunities and leads.
View related information in the Quick View. Create tasks and events, log calls, and send emails, and track all those activities in the Activity Timeline.
Opportunities
Lightning Experience Salesforce Classic Feature
Workspace page layout
Activity timeline
Path
Notes
Visual view of opportunities (Kanban)
Integrated email and templates
Opportunity teams
Opportunity splits
Similar opportunities
Big deal alerts
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Leads
Feature
Workspace page layout
Activity timeline
Path
News
Notes
Change lead owner to a queue
Integrated email and templates
Lead conversion customization via the API
Find and merge duplicate leads
Matching and duplicate rules for leads
Lightning Experience Salesforce Classic
Kanban View
Sales reps can use the Kanban view, a visualization tool for opportunities, to review deals organized by each stage in the pipeline. With drag-and-drop functionality, sales reps can move deals from one stage to another, and get personalized alerts on key deals in flight. Kanban is also available on opportunities, leads, and other objects.
Lightning Experience Salesforce Classic Feature
Charts
Drag and drop
Intelligent Alerts
Type-ahead list view search
Sharing settings
1
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
1
Only list views marked as “Visible only to me” or “Visible to all users” are supported. Sharing with certain groups of users isn’t supported.
Data.com
Feature
Prospect for accounts (Only available with a
Data.com Prospector license)
Prospect for contacts (Only available with a
Data.com Prospector license)
Note:
In Lightning Experience, you can search for and add contact data only if the contact is related to an existing account.
Lightning Experience
Prospect for companies in the same company hierarchy (Only available with a Data.com
Prospector license)
Prospecting Insights (Only available with a
Data.com Prospector license)
View fields updated by Data.com Clean
“Stare and Compare” using Data Integration
Manually update a record using Data
Integration
Clean button
Prospect for companies, contacts, and leads using the Data.com tab (Only available with a Data.com Prospector license)
View data integration rule settings and status
(As of the Spring ’17 release, Clean rules are known as data integration rules.)
Salesforce Classic
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Feature
Add Data.com contacts as leads (Only available with a Data.com Prospector license)
Lightning Experience
See match rates for data integration rules (As of the Spring ’17 release, Clean rules are known as data integration rules.)
Set up Clean settings, jobs, and preferences
View Clean metrics and analytics
Export Data.com records to comma-separated values (CSV) files. (Only available with a
Data.com Prospector license)
Salesforce Classic
Collaborative Forecasts
Feature
Forecasting on opportunity Amount field, opportunity splits, overlay splits, custom opportunity fields, and product families
Revenue and quantity forecasts
Manager and owner adjustments
Cumulative forecast rollups
Support for multiple currencies
Quotas
Forecast hierarchy
Choose the product families to forecast on and the order they appear in (from Setup, if product family forecasts is selected)
Lightning Experience Salesforce Classic
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Feature
Forecasts grid organized first by period, product family, and then user to show product family forecast totals
Lightning Experience
Forecasts grid expansion remains the same during each session
Adjust your own product family forecasts
Opportunity split details in the opportunities list
Adjustable column width
Quota attainment information
Jump to the forecasts of users you have access to view
Forecasts setup
Salesforce Classic
Campaigns
Feature
Campaign member status charts
Import campaign members
Add individual campaign members
Campaign member status updates via import
Clone campaign members
Add and manage campaign members from a list view
Lightning Experience Salesforce Classic
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Salesforce Einstein
Feature Lightning Experience
Analytics
Salesforce Classic
Einstein Discovery
Chatter
Einstein Recommendations
Community
Einstein Related Articles
Einstein Feed Search
Development
Einstein Vision
Sales
Einstein Activity Capture
Einstein Lead Scoring
Einstein Opportunity Insights
Einstein Account Insights
Einstein Automated Contacts
Customer Service
Feature
Case Milestones
Object Milestones
Service Contracts
Lightning Experience Salesforce Classic
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Feature
Service Setup Flows for Email-to-Case,
Communities, Knowledge, and Facebook and
Lightning Experience
Assets
Case Assignment Rules
Console
1
Entitlements
2
Field Service Lightning
Knowledge
3
Open CTI
Products
Snap-ins for Web
4
Social Customer Service
Case Comments
Feed Filters in Case Feed
Live Agent
Macros
Omni-Channel
Quick Text
Solutions
SOS
Salesforce Classic
1
The Service Console in Lightning Experience doesn’t yet have full parity with the Service Console in
Salesforce Classic. Learn more .
2
There are some limitations using Entitlements in Lightning Experience. Learn more .
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
3
Lightning Knowledge is recommended for orgs that are new to Knowledge, or for existing orgs that can easily consolidate to one article type, have few data categories, and use single-language mode. Learn more .
4
Setting up Snap-ins Chat is available in Lightning Experience only. However, the snap-in itself can go anywhere on your website.
Reports
Sales and service reps who use reports find an improved user interface, including the ability to easily create filters and add enhanced charts. And Salesforce admins find features on the dashboard editor, including flexible layouts and spanning columns. However, some report features aren’t yet available in Lightning
Experience, including feeds and scheduled reports.
Lightning Experience Salesforce Classic Feature
Enhanced report charts
Hide totals and subgroups from report view
Interactive filters when viewing reports
Report Builder
Bucket fields
Custom summary formulas
Matrix, Summary, Tabular report formats
Role hierarchy filters
Create report folders
1
Joined reports
Pie charts
Schedule report refreshes
2
Follow reports
Report notifications
Export reports
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
1
You can’t set up folder sharing in Lightning Experience; however, folders that were created in Salesforce
Classic inherit all assigned permissions when viewed in Lightning Experience.
Dashboards
Feature
Display more than 3 columns
Dashboard Builder
View filtered dashboards
View dynamic dashboards
Schedule dashboard refreshes
1
Post dashboard components to feeds
Follow dashboards
Visualforce components
Lightning Experience Salesforce Classic
1
Users can’t schedule dashboards in Lightning Experience, but dashboards scheduled in Salesforce Classic run as expected in Lightning Experience.
List Views
List Views have gotten an upgrade in Lightning Experience, including some super new stuff like the ability to create a quick chart from a list view or add filters with an improved, easy-to-use interface.
Lightning Experience Salesforce Classic Feature
Charts
Create filters on the fly
Search for a list view on the fly
View records visually (Kanban)
Create and edit lists
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Feature
Sortable columns
Resizable columns
Sharing Settings
1
Filter logic
Inline editing
Lightning Experience Salesforce Classic
1
In Lightning Experience, sharing list views marked as “Visible only to me” or “Visible to all users” is supported. Sharing with certain groups of users isn’t supported.
Other Features and Products
Lightning Experience Feature
Custom branding of Salesforce apps
Activities-related composer windows
Create and edit records
Inline editing record detail fields
Inline editing in lists
Customizable Forecasting
Enterprise Territory Management
Original Territory Management
1
Salesforce Communities
2
Partner Portals
Work.com
Salesforce Classic
2
Switch to Salesforce Classic for creating or disabling community users, logging in as a community user, and using delegated administration.
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Other Features That Aren’t Supported
There are some other features that aren’t available or don’t work in Lightning Experience. We want to be transparent with you about them, so you know about customizations you may need to update before enabling Lightning Experience.
Note:
This isn’t a comprehensive list of supported and unsupported features. For a more detailed list, see the Salesforce Help .
Custom JavaScript Buttons
Custom buttons that use a JavaScript content source aren’t supported in Lightning Experience. Check out
Lightning Alternatives to JavaScript Buttons in Trailhead for a great list of Lightning-friendly solutions for your JavaScript button use cases.
AppExchange Apps with Custom Objects, Visualforce
Pages, and More
Many apps from the AppExchange feature customizations, including custom objects, custom buttons,
Visualforce pages, and more. Salesforce partners are testing their apps in Lightning Experience and applying for Lightning Ready certification. Apps that are Lightning Ready work in Lightning Experience and offer a more consistent experience with other Lightning Pages. If an app is supported in Lightning Experience, a
Lightning Ready sash appears on its AppExchange listing. If an app isn’t supported in Lightning Experience, use it in Salesforce Classic instead.
Note: Your org can use apps without Lightning Ready certification in Lightning Experience, but some features might not be available or work as expected. These apps can also appear visually inconsistent with Lightning Experience because they use Salesforce Classic styling. For the best experience, use Salesforce Classic for apps that aren’t certified as Lightning Ready.
Customizing Tabs
Users working in Salesforce Classic may be used to customizing the tabs they see across the top of their screen in Salesforce. Similar to Salesforce Classic, the navigation bar in Lightning Experience gives your users access to sets of objects and tabs. Think of the navigation bar as a container, where the items within it change to represent the app you’re using. The apps you made for Salesforce Classic work in Lightning
Experience without any modifications. In Lightning Experience, when you create a new Lightning app or upgrade a Classic app, you can even brand the app with a custom color and logo.
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Tip: Although your users can’t customize tabs, they can personalize their Lightning Experience navigation with favorites. Like bookmarks in a web browser, favorites allow quick access to important records, lists, groups, dashboards, and other frequently used pages in Salesforce.
There are some items that can’t go in custom navigation menus, including connected apps and some
Salesforce objects that aren’t supported in Lightning Experience. But you and your users can still get to these items via the App Launcher. We’ll look at custom navigation and the App Launcher later.
What About Apex and Visualforce?
When we talk about customizing Salesforce “programmatically,” we’re talking about using code to add new features. Most of the time, like when you’re using the API or writing Apex triggers, there isn’t an actual user interface to the feature. Guess what? All of that stuff just works whether you’re in Salesforce Classic or
Lightning Experience. Woohoo!
Other features do have a user interface. In that case, we’re mostly talking about Visualforce. Your existing
Visualforce pages work in Lightning Experience, many without needing any revisions. Because things have moved around in the new interface, you’ll want to complete some chores to make sure your Visualforce pages work the way you expect.
There are some other considerations for Visualforce pages and apps, and we recommend that you review those. We created an entire Trailhead module just for Visualforce developers, and an entire trail for developing Lightning Experience apps. If you’re using Visualforce or other programmatic customizations in your organization, check out those trails as part of your Lightning Experience evaluation process.
Evaluate Your Org with the Lightning Experience
Readiness Check
To evaluate whether some of the key features and customizations you’ve implemented in Salesforce Classic are ready for Lightning Experience, kick off the Lightning Experience Readiness Check. That way, you can learn which are ready now for Lightning Experience and which may need your attention before you switch over all your users.
You’ll get a personalized Readiness Report, with an assessment of the features and customizations evaluated by the Readiness Check and recommendations on your next steps. Plus you’ll be eligible for a free consultation with a Lightning expert to go over the details in your report. The Readiness Check emails the report to you and also saves it to Salesforce Files.
Curious what exactly is covered in the report? Check out What Does the Lightning Experience Readiness
Check Evaluate?
in the Salesforce Help.
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Run the Readiness Check from the Lightning Experience Migration Assistant. From Setup in Salesforce
Classic, click Get Started in the Migration Assistant tile (1). On the Check Readiness tab in the Migration
Assistant (2), click Check Readiness (3).
We’ve also put together an enablement pack with sample documents and templates, including a gap analysis checklist. You can use this checklist to expand your evaluation to features and customizations that aren’t covered by the Readiness Check.
Best Use Cases for Lightning Experience
If you’ve gone through the list of supported features and you’ve done an evaluation of how ready your org’s features and customizations are for Lightning Experience, then you’re probably starting to get a sense of when you’ll want to enable the new Salesforce interface. But if you’re still not sure, here’s one last comparison chart.
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Chapter 3 Understanding Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Lightning Experience might be right for some or all of your org if:
Salesforce Classic might be right for you if:
•
Your sales team does business-to-business sales using accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, custom objects, and the other sales features supported in the new user interface.
•
You’re looking to reboot your Salesforce implementation. This is a great opportunity to clean up or reinvision your business processes and introduce new features because you’re doing change management anyway.
•
Your sales team makes regular use of features that aren’t available in Lightning Experience, such as territory management.
•
Your service team has a robust knowledge base with Salesforce Knowledge.
Preview Your Org in Lightning Experience
It’s all well and good to talk about use cases and supported and unsupported features. But wouldn’t it be great if you could see your Salesforce org in Lightning Experience without having to enable the new interface? Even if you don’t have a sandbox org? Well, the great news is you can, using the Lightning
Experience Migration Assistant. The Migration Assistant’s Preview feature lets you explore your production org in Lightning Experience, so you can see exactly how your real data and your current customizations work in the new interface. And helpful hint, the Preview is a great way to review the state of features and customizations that aren’t evaluated by the Lightning Experience Readiness Check.
The Preview feature isn’t a locked-down, read-only tour. You can change data, settings, permissions—you name it. But remember that you’re working with your live org. If you do make changes, they’re for real and visible to your users back in Salesforce Classic.
To get started, from Setup in Salesforce Classic, click Get Started in the Lightning Experience Migration
Assistant tile at the top of the menu. On the Preview tab in the Migration Assistant, click Preview to dive in.
34
CHAPTER 4
Your Lightning Experience Rollout
Strategy
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
•
•
Lightning Experience and Salesforce
One of the best investments you can make in your Lightning Experience rollout is to have a clear plan. A plan helps you do things in the right order, identify key resources, communicate with everyone, and have a clear end date in mind.
Depending on the size of your organization, you could be working with a
Change Management department or have a project manager assigned to the rollout. Or perhaps you’re the one charged with organizing and executing the rollout from start to finish. However the work gets divvied up, use
Welcome to Your Lightning Experience Rollout
on page 185 to help define your overall rollout strategy.
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Chapter 4 Your Lightning Experience Rollout Strategy
Enabling Lightning Experience
At this point, you’ve evaluated the benefits of Lightning Experience and are ready to deploy to some or all of your users. Next, we’ll walk you through the technical steps to prepare for and enable Lightning
Experience for your users.
Let’s dive into the details.
Recommended Features for Lightning Experience
If you haven’t already, consider enabling and setting up several supporting features before turning on
Lightning Experience. These features ensure that the new user interface is optimized to help your sales reps sell faster and help your service reps support customers faster.
Related Files
Leverage the rich features and flexibility of Salesforce Files from standard Salesforce objects and your custom objects. Add the new Files related list to page layouts so that users can upload files to records, see files associated with records, and quickly page through files in the modern, visually rich preview player.
Notes
Help your users stay organized with our enhanced note-taking tool. It’s a breeze to create rich-text notes and quickly relate them to specific records. When you turn on Notes, remember to add the new
Notes related list to page layouts so that your users can create and read notes directly from their records.
Path
Help your users adopt your company’s processes to work more efficiently or close more deals. Set up a process based on an object’s status or stage. Add guidance for success at each step in the process.
Duplicate Management
Create duplicate rules to alert users if they’re about to create a duplicate record. Craft your duplicate rules to control whether and when users can create duplicate records in Salesforce.
Lead Conversion
Keep the sales process moving by letting your sales reps convert qualified leads to contacts. At the time of conversion, sales reps select an account for the newly created contact, or create an account if it’s not yet in Salesforce. Reps can also create an opportunity on the spot. Add the Convert button to the Lead page layout.
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Chapter 4 Your Lightning Experience Rollout Strategy
News
Give your reps instant access to relevant, timely news about their accounts, contacts, leads, and opportunities. This feature is available only in English, so if your org uses a different primary language, you might not want this option.
Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads
Keep the team up to date by letting reps link their accounts, contacts, and leads to matching Twitter profiles. Users can see Twitter user profiles and people in common in Salesforce and quickly access tweets.
Shared Activities
Represent activity relationships more accurately by letting your sales reps relate multiple contacts to individual events and tasks. Shared Activities is forever. After the feature’s enabled, it can’t be disabled.
My Domain
Create a custom domain with the Salesforce My Domain feature. A custom domain helps you manage login and authentication. You must set up a custom domain to use Lightning components in Lightning component tabs, Lightning pages, the Lightning App Builder, and standalone apps. To set up a custom domain, see My Domain in the Salesforce Help.
We review some of these features in more depth later on.
You can enable some of these recommended features from the Lightning Experience Migration Assistant, which you can find in Salesforce Classic Setup. Just look for the Lightning Experience Migration Assistant tile at the top of the Setup menu.
Set Up Users for Lightning Experience
Next up, make sure that the right users can access Lightning Experience when it’s turned on. You can fine-tune access with permission sets and custom profiles. Meaning you can do a phased rollout, starting with a small pilot group or a specific team of users who can benefit from the new interface. Or go for it and set your entire organization loose. You can also control who immediately switches to the new interface, who stays in Salesforce Classic until they switch themselves, and who can’t switch back to the classic interface. The power is yours.
Note: Okay, if you use Essentials or Group Edition, that’s overstating things. You can’t remove the
Lightning Experience User permission from your org’s standard profiles, and custom profiles aren’t available. So it’s “all or nothing” in Essentials Edition and Group Edition—all your users get access when Lightning Experience is enabled. But you can control who switches immediately to the new interface and who remains in the classic interface until they’re ready to switch themselves.
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Chapter 4 Your Lightning Experience Rollout Strategy
Users require the Lightning Experience User permission to access Lightning Experience. By default, this permission is automatically enabled for all users with a standard Salesforce profile. Custom profiles don’t automatically include the permission.
So first things first, do you have users with standard profiles who you don’t want accessing Lightning
Experience yet? Move these users to custom profiles that don’t include the Lightning Experience User permission.
For users assigned to custom profiles, decide who gets Lightning Experience access now and who you’ll set up later. Consider these options.
•
Want to test Lightning Experience with a small group of custom profile users but you don’t want to turn it on for everyone assigned to these profiles? Create a permission set that includes the Lightning
Experience User permission. Then apply the permission set to each pilot user. When you turn on
Lightning Experience, only pilot users see the new interface.
•
Interested in rolling out Lightning Experience to everyone assigned to specific custom profiles? Or ready to enable all your custom profile users? Adding the Lightning Experience User permission to profiles is the fastest way to mass-enable the new user interface.
If you’re a Data Loader ninja, you can save time by updating many profiles at once. But remember, with great power comes great responsibility. Take care you don’t inadvertently enable or disable other features.
If you’re limiting Lightning Experience to a subset of your users, try to keep all members of a functional team on the same experience. If you have team members who often share links and work closely together, include them all in your pilot. See #lex_switching_considerations_parent for more details.
Decide Who Immediately Switches to Lightning Experience and Who Can’t Switch Back to Salesforce Classic
You obviously want the users you’ve set up for Lightning Experience to start working in the new interface sooner than later. There are several options you can use to encourage adoption of Lightning Experience.
Choose what’s right for each user.
•
By default, Lightning Experience-enabled users stay in Salesforce Classic and automatically get the
Switcher, so they can switch themselves when they’re ready. This may be the best option if you want to enable Lightning Experience now but your team isn’t fully trained yet or it’s not a good time to introduce a major change.
•
You can set it up so the users who are trained and ready to go immediately get Lightning Experience as their default experience. These users also get the Switcher, so they can return to Salesforce Classic as needed. See #lex_enable_users_switch_to_ui .
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Chapter 4 Your Lightning Experience Rollout Strategy
•
When you’re ready for users to dive into Lightning Experience without looking back, you can move them to the new interface without the option to switch back to Salesforce Classic. See
#lex_enable_users_disable_switcher .
Note: After Lightning Experience is enabled, any new users you add automatically get Lightning
Experience as their default experience if they also have the Lightning Experience User permission—whether from a standard profile or a custom profile that includes the user permission.
New users also get the Switcher so they can access Salesforce Classic, unless you opt to restrict them to Lightning Experience.
Turn Lightning Experience On!
With the right users set up for Lightning Experience, you’re ready to go live. Fortunately, it’s easy to turn on Lightning Experience using the Lightning Experience Migration Assistant.
From Setup in Salesforce Classic, click Get Started in the Migration Assistant tile at the top of the menu.
On the Turn It On tab in the Migration Assistant, click the button to switch it to Enabled.
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Chapter 4 Your Lightning Experience Rollout Strategy
That’s it! The users you’ve enabled and set up to immediately switch to the new interface automatically start enjoying Lightning Experience when their current session refreshes or when they log in. The users you’ve enabled but opted to leave in Salesforce Classic now have access to the Switcher and can switch to Lightning Experience whenever they want.
Switching Between Lightning Experience and Salesforce
Classic
Ideally, Lightning Experience meets the needs of everyone in your org. But just in case someone needs access to a feature or tool back in the classic interface, we provide the Switcher. By default, users enabled for Lightning Experience automatically get the Switcher. Which they can use to...wait for it...switch between
Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic whenever they need.
The Switcher is smart. Whenever you switch, it remembers that user experience as your default preference.
So if you switch to Salesforce Classic, the classic interface becomes your default preference. If you switch back to Lightning Experience, the new interface becomes your default preference. And so on and so on.
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Chapter 4 Your Lightning Experience Rollout Strategy
How do you get to the Switcher?
In Salesforce Classic, click the name in the upper-right corner, then select Switch to Lightning Experience.
In the Lightning Experience header, click the profile picture and select Switch to Salesforce Classic.
A Few Switcher Gotchas
Switching between Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic affects the underlying URL routing logic and can lead to some unexpected results when links are resolved. There can be snags with bookmarks and sharing links in emails or Chatter posts—especially if only a subset of your users is enabled for Lightning
Experience.
If a user clicks a link to something that’s not supported in Lightning Experience, Salesforce switches to
Salesforce Classic in a new tab while the original Lightning Experience window stays open.
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Chapter 4 Your Lightning Experience Rollout Strategy
Users who aren’t enabled for Lightning Experience can’t access Lightning Experience links, including links posted to Chatter or emailed from a Lightning Experience user.
Tip: Keep all members of a functional team on the same experience. If you have team members who often share links and work closely together, include them all in the pilot. Remember, you can roll out Lightning Experience to a specific set of users using profiles or permission sets.
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WHAT'S NEW IN LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE
CHAPTER 5
Navigation and Setup in Lightning
Experience
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
•
•
•
Setup is where you make the magic happen. As a Salesforce admin or developer, you spend a lot of time using Setup. It’s where you customize and configure your organization, support users, build functionality, and more.
One of the huge productivity upgrades that comes with the new Lightning
Experience is the improved Setup. We’ve done a lot of usability testing and refactoring to revamp the Setup tree. We simplified it to have a logical and easy-to-navigate structure, using broad categories to make things more discoverable. In addition, child nodes are now in alphabetical order.
The navigation bar in Lightning Experience provides an efficient and consistent interface to navigate through your organization’s various apps and items. Similar to Salesforce Classic, apps in Lightning Experience give your users access to sets of objects, tabs, and other items all in one convenient bundle in the navigation bar. However, apps in Lightning
Experience take things to another level beyond apps in Salesforce Classic by letting you brand your apps with a custom color and logo. In Lightning
Experience you can even include Lightning page tabs and a utility bar that allows instant access to productivity tools, like integrated voice, in the footer of Lightning Experience.
Ready to see them in action?
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Chapter 5 Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience
The Lightning Experience Navigation Bar
If you know Salesforce Classic, the Lightning Experience navigation model will feel like a familiar friend, only better.
Each Lightning app has a navigation bar at the top of the page, letting your users:
•
Find what they need using item names for easy recognition
•
Complete actions and access recent records and lists with a single click
Think of the navigation bar as a container for a set of items and functionality. It’s always there, but the items within it change based on the app you’re using.
•
The app name displays on the left side of the navigation bar (1) and custom colors and branding (2) make each app unique and easy to identify.
•
Your users can access other items and apps by clicking the App Launcher icon (3) or the app name.
•
Your users can create records and access recent records and lists directly from the navigation bar (4) for items like Opportunities.
What can you put in the Lightning app navigation bar?
If you’re familiar with Salesforce Classic, you know that Classic apps can contain:
•
Most standard objects, including Home, the main Chatter feed, Groups, and People
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Your org’s custom objects
•
Visualforce tabs
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Lightning component tabs
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Canvas apps via Visualforce tabs
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Chapter 5 Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience
•
Web tabs
Lightning apps can contain everything on this list plus Lightning page tabs and utilities like Lightning
Voice. If your org uses utility features, you can enable a utility bar in your app that allows instant access to productivity tools, like integrated voice, in the Lightning Experience footer.
As we mentioned, you and your users can still get to custom apps and objects via the App Launcher, which we’ll look at next.
The App Launcher in Lightning Experience
In Lightning Experience, your users switch between apps through the App Launcher. They can browse the App Launcher to find available apps. Or they can search for an app by name from the
Find an app or item
box at the top of the App Launcher.
In Salesforce Classic, your users commonly switch between apps through the Force.com app menu or the
App Launcher.
To get to the Lightning Experience App Launcher, click from any page. Apps show up as large tiles under All Apps. Apps can include Salesforce standard apps, custom apps, and connected apps like Gmail and Google Drive. Other items, such as custom objects, tasks, events, and the feed, show up under All
Items.
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Chapter 5 Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience
When you click in an app, you see the app name on the left side of the navigation bar. Items associated with the app appear to the right. Your users can create records and access recent records directly from the navigation bar for certain items like Accounts.
As a Salesforce admin, you can change which apps appear on the Lightning Experience App Launcher.
You can also control the order in which the apps appear from the app menu.
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Chapter 5 Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience
1. From Setup, enter
App Menu
in the
Quick Find
box, then select App Menu.
2. From the list of app menu items, drag the apps to change their order. Changes take effect
immediately.
3. Optionally, click Visible in App Launcher or Hidden in App Launcher to show or hide individual
apps from the App Launcher for all users in the org.
The app menu lists all apps installed in the org. However, the apps that users see in their App Launcher and app menu vary depending on each app’s visibility settings and user permissions. Users see only the apps that they are authorized to see according to their profile or permission sets.
Users can drag tiles to sort their personal view of the App Launcher to their liking.
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Chapter 5 Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience
Meet the New and Improved Setup
A nip here? A tuck there? No, we’ve given Setup a whole new face!
You can navigate to Setup from the top of any page in Lightning Experience by clicking > Setup.
The Setup tree has been completely reorganized and recategorized. In Salesforce Classic, the Setup tree had a lot of specific node categories, often with several nodes as nested subcategories. Sometimes there were many different ways to get to a destination. You might have mastered the click paths after a while, but to new users, this structure was often an overwhelming hurdle. The new Setup provides a streamlined interface for viewing and managing your administrative setup tasks.
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Chapter 5 Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience
The new Setup includes these enhancements.
•
The Quick Find (1) lets you quickly navigate to any node using a keyword. Quick Find is the best way to find what you’re looking for if you know its name. Quick Find is your power tool for getting where you need to go!
•
The Create menu (2) gives you quick access to common Setup creation functions—including users, custom objects, custom tabs, apps, email templates, and processes—without having to drill down through the Setup tree to get the page. You can get to the Create menu from any page in Setup.
•
A carousel of quick-access tiles (3) gives you instant access to important setup tools and information, as well as the release notes. The Lightning Experience tile and Setup Salesforce tile help you enable your company for the new and improved UI, and mobile data access. There’s also a link to download
SalesforceA—which lets you do Salesforce administration from a mobile app—and a link to the System
Status screen so you can view your org’s performance and usage data.
•
The Most Recently Used list (4) on the Setup Home page shows your most recently used records or customization features in Setup. You can quickly link back to what you were working on by clicking its name.
•
The Object Manager (5) provides a one-stop shop for managing all objects in your organization, both standard and custom. We’ll look at the object manager in more detail shortly.
Users can access their personal settings at the top of any page by clicking their profile image, then clicking
Settings.
Administration, Platform Tools, and Settings, Oh My!
In the improved Setup, we’ve changed the five Setup tree sections from Administer, Build, Deploy, and
Checkout to three sections: Administration, Platform Tools, and Settings. We completely reorganized all the child nodes to fit into these sections where appropriate, and added broader subcategories to make finding nodes easier, even if you don’t know the exact name you’re looking for.
Not only that, there are fewer child nodes to choose from, as many repetitive nodes in the tree have been removed. We reorganized the platform tools into a more process-oriented organizational structure rather than being feature-oriented. Now you can see pieces of the application life cycle broken up into subcategories: Apps, Objects and Fields, Process Automation, User Interface, Custom Code, and
Environments.
At the bottom of the tree, in the Settings section, you can view company information or configure security.
Note:
As you’re getting familiar with the Setup area, it’s important to keep in mind that navigating through Setup is not about memorizing click paths; it’s about understanding what you're looking for in order to get to your destination. Depending on your users’ profile and permissions, one user
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Chapter 5 Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience might see a different set of items in Setup than another. As a System Administrator, however, you see everything.
Where Did Some of the Nodes Go?
You might have noticed that some of the nodes are missing altogether. Only nodes that are related to customizing the new Lightning Experience are included in the Setup tree. For example, the Service Cloud related nodes are gone, as well as some of the Sales Cloud features. And, we moved all the object-related nodes to the Object Manager, which we’ll look at shortly.
Don’t worry! From a customization and development standpoint, all of the tools are still there. And as the other features become supported in Lightning Experience, you’ll see them in Setup too.
Five Things You Shouldn’t Miss in the Improved Setup
Setup Lightning Experience
•
Your one stop for Lightning Experience customizations
•
Learn best practices
•
Enable/disable Lightning Experience and new features
•
Setup permissions to give users access to Lightning
Experience
Create Menu
•
On every page in Setup
•
Quick access to create common items
Object Manager
App Menu
•
All standard and custom objects now live in the
Object Manager
•
All objects now have a standard detail page that stays visible while you drill into related lists
•
Infinite scroll on all objects’ related lists
Use it to:
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Reorder apps in the App Launcher
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Make apps visible or invisible in the App Launcher
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Chapter 5 Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience
View Release Notes
•
Links to the most recent version of the release notes
•
Great point of reference for new and existing features
Limitations
Advanced Setup Search isn’t available in Lightning Experience. However, you can work around that while in Setup by entering a term in global search and selecting the in Setup option in instant results. The search results page lists records that match your search term.
The Setup tree in Lightning Experience is limited to:
•
Pages that support Lightning Experience features
•
Administration pages that apply across your organization, such as user management, security, and company settings
Use Salesforce Classic to access administration pages for features that aren’t in Lightning Experience.
Object Manager
The Object Manager is a one-stop shop for managing all objects in your organization, both standard and custom. Access all objects and their related functions—fields, validation rules, page layouts, and so on—from a single entry point.
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Chapter 5 Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience
To access the Object Manager, from Setup, click Object Manager.
•
To find an object, enter the first few characters of its label or name in the Find in page box.
•
To edit a custom object, click , then Edit.
•
To view more details about an object or to access its related functions, click the object label.
From the object detail page, you can view the object details and access all related functions, such as fields, validation rules, and page layouts.
•
To quickly jump to a function or control, use the links in the sidebar.
•
To find a function or control by name, enter it in the
Find in page
box.
Limitations
The Object Manager is limited to objects that support Lightning Experience features.
These object functions aren’t listed in the Object Manager. You can access them from elsewhere in Setup.
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Case Comment Triggers
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Feed Comment Triggers
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Feed Item Triggers
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Chapter 5 Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience
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Feed Item Layouts
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Group Layouts
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Group Triggers
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Group Member Triggers
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Group Record Triggers
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Publisher Layouts
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Topic Triggers
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Topic Assignment Triggers
Search for Records
You’ve got a ton of useful data in Salesforce. How do you get to what you need, when you need it? Let’s face it, no one has time to browse anymore. It’s all about search. So let us introduce you to the Lightning
Experience global search box. It’s at the top of every page, and it’s the fastest way to bring what you need right to your fingertips.
Think of search as your personal assistant—your very smart personal assistant. It anticipates your needs and helps you find what you’re looking for from anywhere in the app.
As soon as you click into the box, search starts working for you. A list of recent items provides quick links to records you’ve just visited.
Start typing, and the list dynamically updates with matches from all searchable objects. If you see what you’re looking for, select it to go right to the record.
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Chapter 5 Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience
Speaking of typing, let’s take a moment to talk about what you’re typing. While search is expertly trained to find what you’re looking for, you can help it help you by being as specific as possible when you search.
What does that mean, specifically? First, enter as many terms as you know. Let’s say you’re looking for John
Smith from your sales team. Enter his full name. If you’re looking for the sales report from March 2015, enter sales report March 2015.
Second, even if you’re not completely sure what you’re looking for, use your best guess. This is where search gets to shine. For example, spell correction kicks in automatically when there aren’t any results for your initial search term. Synonyms of your search term are also returned. And if you search for laptop, you also get results for laptops.
Note: Operators (like AND, OR, and AND NOT), exact phrase searches (terms surrounded in “ ”), and wildcards (like * and ?) affect the efficiency and effectiveness of the search engine. Although they’re available, use wildcards, operators, and exact phrase searches only if you’re not finding what you’re looking for using basic keyword searches.
OK, so you’ve entered your search terms. Don’t see what you need in the dropdown list? Don’t worry—you’ve got options. To see results only for the object you’re on, select the second option in the instant results dropdown list.
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Chapter 5 Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience
Alternatively, you can select the first option or press Enter to search across your entire organization. You’ll land on the Top Results page, which shows you the most relevant results from your most frequently used objects.
From this high-level overview, it’s easy to home in on what you need. See results for a specific object by selecting it on the left, under Search Results.
If you don’t see an object you need under Search Results, don’t worry, it’s close at hand. Select Show More to see all objects available to you, listed in alphabetical order.
Search results are sorted by relevance. That sounds smart—and it is!—but what does it mean, exactly?
Several things are considered, like how unique the search term is, how often the search term appears in a record, and whether an item is owned by the person searching. You can also sort search results by clicking column headers or using the sort dropdown menu.
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Chapter 5 Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience
You can adjust column widths on the search results page by clicking and dragging the borders in the column header.
Text wrapping is on by default, but you can change this preference for a column by clicking the down arrow in the column header.
What to Do If You Don’t Find What You’re Searching For
•
Check your spelling and verify that you entered the full search term.
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Chapter 5 Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience
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Check whether the object or field is searchable.
•
Make sure you have access to the record. Search only returns results you have permission to view.
•
If you recently created or updated the record, wait a few minutes for the record to be indexed. If you can’t find your record after 15 minutes, contact your admin.
We think you’ll agree you’ve found the perfect assistant—it has a broad perspective, yet directs you to the important things. It also doesn’t take vacations or ask for a raise. It saves you so much time and makes getting around Salesforce so easy, though, that it probably deserves one.
Lightning Experience Help Menu
In Lightning Experience, each page has a contextual help menu with links to resources—help topics, walkthroughs, videos, developer guides, and PDFs—related to the specific tasks on that page.
On object pages, the menu replaces the “Help for this Page” link that you’re used to seeing in Salesforce
Classic. The “Help for this Page” link still appears on many Setup pages, but we encourage you to use the help menu instead for a broader selection of useful information.
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Chapter 5 Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience
When you click a video link ( ), a video player appears, allowing you to watch without leaving Salesforce.
Walkthrough links ( ) take you to the first step of the walkthrough in your organization. Help, developer guide, and PDF links open in a new browser tab.
You can’t customize the items in the help menu. If you’ve created custom help links, those links still work from the “Help for this Page” links in the framed Salesforce Classic pages. However, your custom help links don’t appear in the new Help menu.
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CHAPTER 6
Opportunities, Leads, and Selling in
Lightning Experience
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
We’ve taken your sales process and put it into an action-first workspace, designed to help your sales reps work their deals faster and smarter. You can customize coaching scripts for each step in the sales process, create records quickly with fewer clicks, and ultimately close deals faster.
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Chapter 6 Opportunities, Leads, and Selling in Lightning Experience
Explore the Opportunity Workspace
Opportunities have gotten a makeover! When you visit an opportunity record in Lightning Experience, you’ll see some great enhancements that help your sales users get the most out of their opportunities.
Here are just a few things your users can do from the opportunity workspace:
•
Create and update tasks and meetings, log calls, and send email
•
View key information for a deal, like its key players, account, close date, amount, owner, and stage
•
Update an opportunity’s stage, close date, and amount
•
View or add members to an opportunity team
•
View relevant, timely news about the account the opportunity is related to
You don’t have to do anything to get the opportunity workspace working for your users. However, as an administrator, you can enhance your sales users’ workflow by customizing the sales path and the activity timeline to their needs.
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Chapter 6 Opportunities, Leads, and Selling in Lightning Experience
Path
Paths guide your sales users through each stage of your company’s sales process. Paths help users stay focused on important tasks so they can close deals or complete work quickly.
From Setup, enter
Path Settings
in the
Quick Find
box, then select Path Settings. You can create a unique path for each record type for leads, opportunities, quotes, and custom objects.
Path Best Practices
•
Provide guidance for success content, like links to Chatter posts and videos, tips, or policy reminders—anything that can help sales reps get closer to sealing the deal.
•
Keep your system performance optimal by creating sales paths that have 20 or fewer stages.
•
Consider labeling sales paths for regions or industries, like “Steel Industry Sales Path.”
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Chapter 6 Opportunities, Leads, and Selling in Lightning Experience
•
If you set up record types, you can have one path for each record type. For example, in the record type
New Business, include more prospecting-related fields, but in the record type Existing Customer, include a field or stage for renewals.
Activity Timeline
With the activity timeline, your sales reps can keep a finger on the pulse of their deals. The timeline tracks meetings, tasks, calls, and emails. Reps can see what they’ve done and what they still have left to do for each opportunity, lead, account, and contact.
Activity Timeline Considerations
When working with the activity timeline, keep the following in mind.
The configuration of page layouts and record types affects the tabs in the activity composer
Don’t see the tabs for calls, tasks, events, or emails in the activity composer? Adjust your page layouts, record types, and user permissions. See Add Send an Email, Log a Call, New Event, and New Task
Buttons to the Activity Composer.
The activity timeline replaces the Open Activities and Activity History related lists
On the detail page for objects that support activities, Lightning Experience doesn’t display Open
Activities or Activity History along with other related lists. It displays the activity timeline instead. Objects
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Chapter 6 Opportunities, Leads, and Selling in Lightning Experience that support activities include opportunities, leads, accounts, contacts, and any custom objects on which you enable activities. You can customize the activity timeline using the Lightning App Builder.
You can customize the display and order of fields in the activity timeline
In the activity timeline, you can customize the display and order of fields for events, tasks, and logged calls using event and task compact layouts. Even if you remove certain fields from a compact layout, they remain in the activity timeline because they contain essential activity information. For example, suppose that you remove the due date, the date and time, or the task status fields from a compact layout. The event start date and time, the task checkbox, the task due date, and the call logging date still appear on activities in the timeline. The description field for events and the comments field for tasks also always appear in the timeline, although they aren’t available in the compact layout. The remaining fields visible in the timeline reflect the fields you include in the compact layout.
The activity timeline icons aren’t customizable
The icons for activity types (events, tasks, calls, and email) in the timeline aren’t customizable.
Opportunity Home
The Opportunity home page in Lightning Experience looks a lot like other object home pages at first glance. You might not notice it at first, but an awesome feature is waiting to be discovered there.
Kanban View
The Kanban view for Opportunities is a visual representation of all of a sales rep’s deals, organized by each stage in the pipeline. You can get to the Kanban view by selecting Kanban from the Displays menu on all list views except Recently Viewed.
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Chapter 6 Opportunities, Leads, and Selling in Lightning Experience
The records in the Kanban view are based on the selected list view (1). Reps can’t view the Kanban for
Recently Viewed list views. Easily toggle between the list view grid view and the Kanban view (2). Filter records to select a single record type or view a particular subset of records (3). Records are separated based on record type (4). Records are grouped into columns (5) based on the grouping field selected. Quickly move a record to a different stage by dragging the card (6). For opportunities, alerts tell how to keep a deal on track, for example, create a task or event (7).
Here, your users can manage their opportunities through all phases of the pipeline, dragging and dropping opportunities from one column to another. A yellow triangle on an opportunity card can indicate three types of alerts: overdue tasks, no open activities, or no activity for 30 days. Users can click the triangle to create tasks and events right from the card. Items on the board vary based on which list view is open.
Tip: The Kanban view isn’t just for opportunities--you can access a Kanban view for almost any list view.
Explore the Lead Workspace
Qualifying and converting leads is easy for your sales reps. Lightning Experience includes a lead workspace—command central where your reps track, update, and convert leads to contacts.
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Chapter 6 Opportunities, Leads, and Selling in Lightning Experience
Just like with opportunities, the workspace for leads includes Path. You set up paths to include specific fields and guidance for success in each stage of the lead qualification process.
To convert a lead, your reps click the Converted stage in the path. Then, they either select an account or create one on the spot. Reps can also create an opportunity.
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CHAPTER 7
Explore More of Lightning Experience
In this chapter ...
•
•
Object Home Pages and List Views
•
How Other Objects are Organized in
•
•
Opportunities and leads aren’t the only places we’ve made improvements.
There are slick new features to discover elsewhere, like the new Home page, revamped object home pages and enhanced list views, and enhanced
Chatter and activities options.
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Chapter 7 Explore More of Lightning Experience
The Home Page
The Home page displays key items for each user’s day. From the Home page, your users can manage their day, including viewing their quarterly performance summary and the most relevant tasks and updates.
You can also use the Lightning App Builder to create custom Home pages that appear for different profiles.
Give your users access to opportunity details so that they can get the most out of the Home page.
Performance Chart (1)
The performance chart displays data based on opportunities belonging to the user or the user’s sales team.
Only opportunities for the current sales quarter that are closed or open with a probability over 70% are displayed. Multicurrency is supported in the performance chart.
Curious about the numbers at the top of the chart? Here’s what they mean.
•
Closed—The sum of a user’s closed opportunities.
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Chapter 7 Explore More of Lightning Experience
•
Open (>70%)—The sum of a user’s open opportunities with a probability over 70%. The blue line in the chart is the combined total of the closed opportunities and open opportunities with a probability over 70%.
•
Goal—A user’s customizable sales goal for the quarter. This field is specific to the performance chart and has no impact on forecast quotas or any other type of goals. Click to set the goal.
Assistant (2)
The Assistant shows your users things they need to address, including new leads and activities related to opportunities.
Items in the Assistant appear in the following order:
•
Leads assigned to you today
•
Opportunities with overdue tasks
•
Opportunities with no activity in 30 days
•
Opportunities with no open activity
If your users don’t have access to activities on opportunities or if the opportunity pipeline is off, they instead see opportunities that have close dates over the next 90 days.
Note: In Salesforce Classic, the Home page has a Chatter feed. In Lightning Experience, that feed isn't there. Instead, Chatter is on the navigation bar. When you want to access Chatter on a record, go to the Chatter tab.
The Assistant doesn’t show tasks due today or overdue tasks that aren’t tied to an opportunity. The Today’s
Tasks component is an alternative that’s available on the Home page, and it shows a list of your tasks due today.
To populate the performance chart, Top Deals, and the Assistant, users must have:
Table 3: Required Permissions for Home Features
Permission or Setting Performance
Chart
Top
Deals
Read access to the Opportunity object and sharing access to relevant opportunities
Read access to the Opportunity object’s Amount field
Assistant
Read access to the Opportunity object’s Probability field
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Permission or Setting
“Run Reports” user permission enabled for users
Closed opportunities or open opportunities with a probability over 70% during the current fiscal quarter
Read access to the Lead object
Performance
Chart
Top
Deals
Assistant
Object Home Pages and List Views
Salesforce Classic has a separate page for an object’s home and another for its list views. In Lightning
Experience, we’ve combined them!
What’s that gear menu for? It contains options for managing your list views.
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In the charts panel ( ), you can change the type of chart or create a new one. Click to add, set, or remove filters.
The name of the recent records list that displays by default on the home page for standard and custom objects is different in Lightning Experience. It’s called Recently Viewed. There’s another list view available for most standard objects that has the object type specified in the name. For example, the list view for accounts is called Recently Viewed Accounts. These two list views, Recently Viewed and Recently Viewed
Object
, show the same records. Neither list is deletable, filterable, or editable.
As an administrator, you can configure an object’s Recently Viewed search layout for your users. The search layout controls what all users see when they land on that object’s home page. In Lightning Experience, from Setup, find the object in the Object Manager, then scroll to its Search Layout related list and edit the
Search Results search layout.
You can also go directly to an object’s details page by selecting Edit Object from the Setup menu.
Considerations When Working with Object Home Pages and List Views
Some features and links that are available on object home pages in Salesforce Classic aren’t available on comparable pages in Lightning Experience. You can still view, create, edit, and delete list views on these pages, but the steps you take for these tasks are different, and there are differences in how list views display and behave. Here are a few examples. The rest can be found in Lightning Experience Considerations .
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•
Navigation through list views has changed. Because list views have infinite scrolling, you can’t specify the number of records to show per page. Also, you can’t navigate through pages with arrow buttons, and you can’t jump to a specific page of results.
•
The list views drop-down menu shows up to 2,000 views. The menu loads views in batches of 50 as you scroll down. Recently viewed lists appear first, followed by other list views in alphabetical order.
Recently viewed lists and the Search box appear only if there are 11 or more list views.
•
Instead of an alphabet rolodex for list views, the List View Controls drop-down menu has auto-complete search that’s enabled whenever there are more than 10 list views.
•
You can change the columns that appear and their order by choosing Select Fields to Display from the List View Controls drop-down menu.
•
Your users can reorder the columns of the Recently Viewed
Object
list in Salesforce Classic, and the changes are reflected in Lightning Experience.
•
Custom buttons and custom actions aren’t supported for list views or list view items.
How Other Objects are Organized in Lightning
Experience
Opportunities and leads have special workspaces. The other objects have a different structure. Some elements, like related lists and the Activity and Chatter tabs, appear in different places than we saw on opportunities and leads.
For example, here’s a contact page.
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The highlights panel is in the same place across all objects. But here there’s no Path, and the Activity and
Chatter tabs are together in the right hand column. Related lists are in their own tab in the main part of the page, alongside the Details tab.
Some objects have special components that appear on their pages (for example, accounts, contacts, leads, and opportunities include News), but the overall structure remains the same across all objects.
Cases
Cases look slightly different than other records. Cases display a feed first rather than record details or related information, because support agents mainly collaborate and work with activities in a feed. Details appear next to the feed. You don’t see the Activity or Chatter tabs because this information displays directly in the feed.
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If you turn off Case Feed, cases look like other records. Activities and collaboration appear, but the feed-first design disappears and adds more clicks and context-switching to cases. You can use collaboration (Chatter) instead of feed, but collaboration doesn’t include useful case feed publishers, such as email, log a call, or change status.
To fully benefit from the new feed-first design on cases, re-create the standard case feed publishers. The standard publishers aren’t available, but you can quickly re-create them as quick actions on the Case object.
One benefit of re-creating the publishers as quick actions is that they appear on mobile devices, whereas standard case feed publishers don’t.
Custom Objects
Custom objects are supported in Lightning Experience, and custom object home pages contain the same standard elements as other objects, such as details, related lists, highlights panel, activities and a feed
(Chatter).
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On this particular custom object, Expense Report, feed tracking hasn’t been enabled. So, the Chatter tab, which you’d normally see next to Activity, doesn’t appear.
Tip: On object home and record pages, you can select Edit Object from the Setup menu to go directly to that object’s detail page.
User Profiles
The user profile page has been streamlined in Lightning Experience. From here, you can follow a user, see their details, edit their information (if you have permission), and see team members, files, groups, and other related information.
As with other objects, the pertinent details are in the main part of the page and the related lists are in the right-hand column. One unique thing about the user profile page is that the Google map that you see by default on address fields for other objects is disabled for users.
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Tasks, Calendar, and Events
There’s a better way to track the work you need to do to move deals ahead, with some nifty enhancements to tasks and calendars in Lightning Experience.
Tasks
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•
View a list of all your open tasks, showing the opportunities, accounts, and other records they’re related to. See and edit details right there on the same page.
•
Switch to views of tasks due today, all overdue tasks, tasks completed in the last 7 days, and tasks you’ve delegated.
•
If you have 10 or more overdue tasks, they’re collapsed under Show More Overdue Tasks.
Calendar
Calendar week view:
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Calendar day view:
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Calendar month view:
Chapter 7 Explore More of Lightning Experience
When you view, create, and edit events in Lightning Experience, the calender is streamlined and easier to use. The calendar displays all events owned by a user, including events outside a user’s business hours, in the time zone selected in your Salesforce settings.
Let’s say you want to track campaigns, cases, retail store events, opportunities, and more. Just add calendars for all of these things. Choose a field to track on any standard or custom object. The calendar displays data in that field as calendar items.
Users can customize most calendars by applying a list view, and they can edit and delete calendars they’ve created.
You can distinguish calendars by color and texture.
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Calendar views display up to 150 items, including items from calendars you create.
You can’t set or view event reminders; create or edit recurring events; or create, edit, accept, or decline meeting invites. However, suppose that a Salesforce Classic user creates a series of recurring events.
Lightning Experience users see the individual events on their calendars. Similarly, Lightning Experience users see individual events that they’ve been invited to by Salesforce Classic users.
If you'd like your users to be able to create, edit, accept, and decline meeting invites, consider enabling the Lightning Sync feature.
Chatter in Lightning Experience
Wondering what’s up with Chatter in Lightning Experience? There are lots of changes to groups and profiles and many other useful updates to increase the awesomeness of Chatter in Lightning Experience.
More Features in Groups and Profiles
In Chatter topics and group feeds, when someone posts critical information, an authorized user can pin that post to the top of the feed. The post stays in place until an authorized user unpins it. Post pinning is a beta feature in the Winter ’18 release.
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Find out which groups have the most activity in your org with a new custom report type. Create the custom report type using Groups as the Primary object, and monitor your groups’ rankings accordingly.
Groups and profiles are taking on that Trailhead flavor with a new default banner image and avatar.
Use the Out of Office feature on your profile to set the dates you're away and add a custom message. Your message and dates display prominently next to your name almost anywhere that your name appears.
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New Ways to See Streams
Cross-community streams give you easy access to all your streams, whether internal or community-based.
View all your streams in your internal Salesforce org. Cross-community streams is a pilot feature in the
Winter ’18 release.
Other Exciting Greatness
Mass encryption and decryption of Chatter data is now generally available.
You can request that topic suggestions are disabled for your org. Topic suggestions are enabled by default, so contact Salesforce Customer Support to disable topic suggestions.
Emojis have arrived! Engage your audience by adding zest to your feed.
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CHAPTER 8
Reports and Dashboards in Lightning
Experience
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
•
Interactive Charts and Filters on the
•
We’ve redesigned reports and dashboards for Lightning Experience, making them more interactive, easier to navigate, and easier to edit. Let’s see what reports and dashboards in Lightning Experience can do!
Here’s a quick overview:
•
Get more information from interactive charts without needing to drill into reports (the charts look fabulous, too!)
•
Create dashboards with more than three columns and column-spanning components using the lightning dashboard editor
•
Edit filters while viewing a report without launching the report builder and see data update in real time
•
Show or hide a chart, totals, and details from the report
•
Find, manage, and create reports and dashboards more easily via redesigned home pages
•
Get started with ready-to-go sales and service dashboards
•
Work with your reports and dashboards from Salesforce Classic in
Lightning Experience
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Report and Dashboard Home Pages
We’ve redesigned the Reports and Dashboards home pages in Lightning Experience so that your users can find and create reports and dashboards more easily.
Find a report or dashboard using filtered lists and folders (1). Filtered lists are the fastest way to find the report or dashboard you’re looking for. For example, you can quickly find the Open Deals report you were reading last Friday in Recent. Folders let you group related reports or dashboards, so they’re easy to find again later.
Click a column heading (2) to sort by name, folder, creator, or whoever last modified a report or dashboard.
Click again to reverse the sort order.
You can build a new report or dashboard (3) right from this page. In Lightning Experience, you build reports just like you did in Salesforce Classic using the report builder. On the Dashboards home page, clicking
New Dashboard launches the lightning dashboard editor, which we’ll look at in more depth next.
To run and view a report or open a dashboard, click its name (4).
Create Beautiful Dashboards Using a Feature-Rich
Editor
Lightning Experience introduces a new dashboard editor that’ll usher in a whole new generation of dashboards.
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Drag the corners and sides of dashboard components to make them bigger or smaller (1). Components can span multiple columns and rows, so you can show more fields on a graph without needing to scroll.
Charts automatically resize to match component size. Click to choose the report that provides data for the component, chart type, the report data drawn in the chart, chart title, or range.
Arrange dashboard components more easily than ever by dragging them anywhere on the flexible grid
(2). Not only that, but you can create dashboards with more than three columns (3)! The foundation of each dashboard is a responsive grid, so you can compare metrics side-by-side-by-side.
Present and Share Information in Interactive
Dashboards
Interactive dashboard components give viewers more information and link to data-supplying reports.
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The buttons and drop-down menu (1) provide one-click access to administrative tasks, such as refresh, edit, clone, save, and delete.
Have more questions about a metric or chart? Click View Report (2) to drill into the data. Hover over a chart (3) to learn more about it.
Get More Information from Interactive Charts and Filters on the Report Run Page
In Lightning Experience, new features on the report run page ensure that reports answer even your toughest questions.
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Get more from your report with the tools in the header (1).
•
— Show or hide a report chart.
•
— Add, remove, or change report filters. After applying a filter, the report automatically refreshes to show filtered data. You no longer have to open the report builder to filter a report.
•
— Open the report feed to collaborate with others on report data.
•
— Refresh your report to show the latest data.
•
— Show or hide details like subtotals, grand totals, and record counts from your report.
Clicking Edit launches the report builder. The action menu provides one-click access to saving, cloning, and deleting the report.
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You can view key metrics at the top of every report (2). Report headers float on both the X and Y axes (3), so you always know what field you’re reviewing without needing to scroll. And, we’ve redesigned the report format so that groupings are easier to read (4).
You can add, remove, and edit report filters (5) right from the report’s page. You no longer have to open the report builder to filter the report you’re reading. If you want to see your sales pipeline for the apparel industry, edit the
Industry
filter accordingly and your report refreshes.
You can also lock filters (6). If you want to share a report about your late-stage sales pipeline and don’t want to share early-stage data, lock the
Stage
filter. Locked filters can’t be edited on the report run page.
You lock and unlock filters in the report builder.
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You’re probably wondering: “But can I customize the chart?” Yes, you can (7)! Change the chart type, title, and more from the chart options menu ( ).
Reports and Dashboards: Compatibility Between
Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic
Wondering how reports or dashboards created in one user interface work in the other? Here is a breakdown of what to expect.
For reports and dashboards created in Salesforce Classic:
•
You can view and edit both in Lightning Experience.
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•
After saving a Salesforce Classic dashboard in Lightning Experience, you can’t edit it in Salesforce
Classic. Instead of editing a Salesforce Classic dashboard in Lightning Experience, consider cloning the dashboard and editing the clone. That way, you can still edit the original dashboard in Salesforce
Classic.
•
Lightning Experience obeys sharing rules set on report and dashboard folders in Salesforce Classic.
Users can’t set sharing rules by folder in Lightning Experience.
•
You can view and open folders that you created in Salesforce Classic in Lightning Experience.
•
Joined reports aren’t supported in Lightning Experience.
For reports and dashboards created in Lightning Experience:
•
You can view and edit reports created in Lightning Experience in Salesforce Classic.
•
You can’t edit dashboards created in Lightning Experience in Salesforce Classic, but you can view them.
•
Dashboards that you create in Lightning Experience that have more than three columns automatically display in Salesforce Classic with three columns (retaining all dashboard components).
For more information on the limitations for reports and dashboards, see the Salesforce Help .
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HOW YOUR EXISTING CUSTOMIZATIONS
AFFECT LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE
CHAPTER 9
Your Layouts Can Customize
Lightning Experience Records
In this chapter ...
•
•
You can customize the content of your record pages in Lightning
Experience using tools you’re already familiar with: page layouts and compact layouts.
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Page Layouts in Lightning Experience
When you customize your page layouts in Salesforce Classic, those changes can affect the content of object record pages in Lightning
Experience. However, in Lightning Experience, the page elements display differently, and some aren’t supported.
If you’re in an org that supports multiple page layouts, you can create a page layout directly from the Page Layouts related list on any object in the Object Manager. You can also edit or delete an object’s page layouts by clicking on a page layout in the Page Layouts related list.
Here’s a sample contact record in Lightning Experience. The highlights panel contains key fields for the record, and is the only part of a record page that you can’t customize using the page layout editor. The fields in the highlights panel are customized using a compact layout.
EDITIONS
Available in: Lightning
Experience
Page layouts are available in: All Editions
Creation and deletion of page layouts is available in:
Enterprise, Performance,
Unlimited, and Developer
Editions
These page layout elements are supported in Lightning Experience.
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Actions
Actions display in different places, such as the highlights panel, Activity tab, and the Collaborate tab.
The actions are derived from the list of actions in the Salesforce Mobile and Lightning Experience
Actions section of the page layout. Some actions aren’t supported in Lightning Experience.
For more information, see Actions in Lightning Experience on page 100.
Blank Spaces
Blank spaces are supported in Lightning Experience.
Canvas Apps
Canvas apps are supported in Lightning Experience.
Custom Links
Custom links display under the Details tab.
Fields
Fields display under the Details tab. You can remove or reorder fields on a page layout only via the page layout editor.
Related Lists
Related lists are included as Lightning components in Lightning Experience. Not all related lists are supported in Lightning Experience.
In Lightning Experience, only the first four fields on a related list are displayed. Users can click View
All to see the rest of the fields.
Report Charts
Report charts that you add to a page layout appear under the Details tab in Lightning Experience.
When you add a report chart to a page layout, it can take a few moments before the chart appears on
Lightning record pages.
Sections
Sections appear along with fields under the Details tab. A section with no header is incorporated into the section above it.
Standard and Custom Buttons
Standard and custom buttons are treated as actions in Lightning Experience, just like in the Salesforce app.
Important:
Custom buttons that call JavaScript aren’t supported in Lightning Experience.
Visualforce Pages
Visualforce pages that you’ve added to the page layout appear under the Details tab. Only Visualforce pages with Available for Salesforce mobile apps and Lightning pages enabled display in Lightning
Experience.
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Visualforce pages that have been put into the Mobile Cards section as components don’t appear in
Lightning Experience.
These page layout elements aren’t supported in Lightning Experience.
•
Expanded lookups
•
Mobile cards
Note: The Twitter card that you see on account, contact, and lead record pages in Lightning
Experience isn’t the same as the Twitter component available as a mobile card in the page layout editor. The Twitter card in Lightning Experience is a Lightning component. You must have Social
Accounts and Contacts enabled for it to appear.
•
S-controls
•
Tags
Note: You can’t use the enhanced page layout editor to customize the layout of Lightning Experience record home pages.
Compact Layouts in Lightning Experience
If you’ve completed the Salesforce Mobile Basics module, you’re familiar with compact layouts and how they work in the Salesforce app. Compact layouts play the same role in Lightning Experience: displaying a record’s key fields in the highlights panel of a record page. Compact layouts are also used in other places, such as the activity timeline and expanded lookup cards.
A compact layout lets you put the most important fields where your users can easily see them. If your org supports record types, you can assign a compact layout to different record types, just like you can with a page layout.
In Lightning Experience, the first six fields that you add to a compact layout appear in an object’s record highlights panel and in the expanded lookup card you see when you hover over a link in record details.
The field you put first displays at the top in bold.
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Tip: Put the object’s
Name
field first to provide context for your users when they view a record.
Event and task compact layouts determine the fields that show up in the details section when you expand an activity in the activity timeline in Lightning Experience. When you change the compact layout for tasks in the activity timeline, you also impact the fields that show up in the highlights area on tasks, in tasks lists, and everywhere else the compact layout is used.
You can create and edit a compact layout from the Compact Layouts related list on any object in the Object
Manager in Lightning Experience.
Changes you make to a compact layout are reflected in both Lightning Experience and the Salesforce app.
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CHAPTER 10 Actions and Lightning Experience
In this chapter ...
•
•
Actions enable users to do more in Salesforce, such as create or update records and log calls.
If you’ve already created and used actions in your organization, you’re familiar with how they work in Salesforce Classic. If you’ve used our mobile apps, you’ve seen how they work in the Salesforce app. In Lightning
Experience, instead of showing up in one place—like the Chatter publisher or the Salesforce app action bar—actions are split into different areas.
Next, we go over where you can find actions, which actions are and aren’t supported, and how the customizations you’ve made to actions on a page layout affect how they display in Lightning Experience.
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Actions in Lightning Experience
In Lightning Experience, actions display in the Global Actions menu in the header, on related lists, on list view items, and in several places on a record page. Where they appear on a record page depends on the action’s type.
Actions in the Global Actions Menu
The Global Actions menu displays a subset of global actions from the
Salesforce Mobile and Lightning Experience Actions section of the global publisher layout.
EDITIONS
Available in: both Salesforce
Classic and Lightning
Experience
Quick actions available in:
Group, Professional,
Enterprise, Performance,
Unlimited, Contact
Manager, Database.com, and Developer Editions
Custom canvas actions available in: Professional
(with Force.com Canvas enabled), Enterprise,
Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions
The items in the menu display in the order that they’re listed in the Salesforce Mobile and Lightning
Experience Actions section of the page layout.
Actions associated with objects that aren’t supported in Lightning Experience don’t display in the Global
Actions menu. Also, the Global Actions menu doesn’t support the standard Chatter actions Post, File, Poll,
Link, Question, and Thanks.
Actions on List View Items
Except for the Tasks object, only standard button actions are supported on list view items. Items in Tasks list views contain the full list of actions available for tasks.
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Actions on the Home Page
On the Home page, you can find actions on recommendations in the Assistant. For example, if a sales rep receives an update that an opportunity doesn’t have any open activity, the rep can create a task or event directly from the recommendation.
The actions that appear depend on the type of recommendation. The available actions include:
•
New Task
•
New Event
•
Edit
•
After you complete an action, the related recommendation disappears from the Assistant.
Actions on the Chatter Page
The Chatter page, like the Chatter tab on record pages, contains only standard Chatter actions. By default, only the Post, Poll, and Question actions are supported, and if you have Groups, the Announcement action.
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You can add, remove, or reorder the actions on the Chatter page from the Salesforce Mobile and Lightning
Experience Actions section of the global publisher layout.
Actions on Record Pages
Here’s a sample contact page in Lightning Experience.
Note:
The opportunity and leads workspaces have different structures, but actions appear in the same way on those pages.
The page-level action menu in the record’s highlights panel (1) contains:
•
Productivity actions
•
Global and object-specific quick actions, except for those related to creating tasks, creating events, and logging calls
•
Standard buttons
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•
Custom object-specific Lightning component quick actions
•
Custom flow actions (beta)
•
Custom Visualforce quick actions
•
Custom Visualforce buttons
•
Canvas actions
The actions that appear in the page-level action menu display in the order that they are listed in the
Salesforce Mobile and Lightning Experience Actions section of the page layout.
The Activity tab (2) contains Create a Record quick actions that point to the Event and Task objects. It also contains Log A Call actions and Send Email actions.
The Chatter tab (3) contains standard Chatter actions. By default, only the Post, Poll, and Question actions are supported, and if you have Groups, the Announcement action. Some objects support other standard
Chatter actions predefined by Salesforce.
Note: Actions on cases and work orders appear in a different way than on other records. On case and work order records, the page-level action menu contains custom buttons and supported standard buttons. Quick actions appear on the Feed tab.
Actions on Related Lists
Related lists (4) contain the standard buttons normally found on related lists. Usually, it’s simply the New button.
Example: Let’s say you have these actions on your Contact page layout in the Salesforce Mobile and Lightning Experience Actions section.
You have quick actions (New Account, New Event, New Task), a productivity action (Call), standard buttons (Edit, Delete, Clone, Send an Email), and Chatter actions (Poll, Post). Here’s how those actions display on a contact record page in Lightning Experience.
•
The actions in the page-level action menu are a combination of the quick actions, productivity actions, and standard buttons in the order that they’re listed on the page layout. Although they’re quick actions, New Event and New Task don’t show up here.
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•
The Chatter actions from the front of the action list are on the Chatter tab.
•
The Activities-related actions—Email, New Event, New Task—display on the Activity tab.
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How Actions Are Ordered in Lightning Experience
In Lightning Experience, the actions on record pages are derived from the list of actions in the Salesforce Mobile and Lightning Experience
Actions section of the page layout for that object. The same section on global publisher layouts determines the global actions that appear in the Global Actions menu.
If you haven’t customized the Salesforce Mobile and Lightning
Experience Actions section of an object’s page layout, the quick actions that appear on the object’s record pages are derived from:
•
The actions on the global publisher layout
•
Standard and custom buttons in the buttons section of the object page layout
If you customize the Salesforce Mobile and Lightning Experience
Actions section, the standard and custom buttons in the buttons section of the page layout aren’t automatically included in the action list. You must add the buttons as actions from the Mobile & Lightning
Actions category in the palette.
The actions in each section of the record page respect the ordering of its types of actions on the page layout.
EDITIONS
Available in: both Salesforce
Classic and Lightning
Experience
Quick actions available in:
Group, Professional,
Enterprise, Performance,
Unlimited, Contact
Manager, Database.com, and Developer Editions
Custom canvas actions available in: Professional
(with Force.com Canvas enabled), Enterprise,
Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions
The Global Actions menu ( ) in the Lightning Experience header displays all global quick actions from the Salesforce Mobile and Lightning Experience Actions section of the global publisher layout, except the standard Chatter actions Post, File, Poll, Link, Question, and Thanks.
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CREATE LIGHTNING APPS
CHAPTER 11 What Is a Lightning App?
In this chapter ...
•
•
Find Items and Apps in the App Launcher
•
•
An app is a collection of items that work together to serve a particular function. Salesforce apps come in two flavors: Classic apps and Lightning apps. Classic apps are created and managed in Salesforce Classic. Lightning apps are created and managed in Lightning Experience. You can customize both types of app to match the way your users work.
Similar to apps in Salesforce Classic, Lightning apps give your users access to sets of objects, tabs, and other items all in one convenient bundle in the navigation bar. However, Lightning apps take things to a level beyond
Classic apps. Lightning apps let you brand your apps with a custom color and logo. You can even include a utility bar and Lightning page tabs in your Lightning app.
With apps in Lightning Experience, members of your org can work more efficiently by easily switching between apps. Users can open apps you’ve created from the App Launcher. What’s most important to sales reps?
Accounts, events, and organizations. How about sales managers? Reports and dashboards make the top of the list.
Let’s jump into the details.
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Navigate at the Speed of Lightning
If you know Salesforce Classic, the Lightning Experience navigation model will feel like a familiar friend, only better.
Each Lightning app has a navigation bar at the top of the page, letting your users:
•
Find what they need using item names for easy recognition
•
Complete actions and access recent records and lists with a single click
Think of the navigation bar as a container for a set of items and functionality. It’s always there, but the items within it change based on the app you’re using.
•
The app name displays on the left side of the navigation bar (1) and custom colors and branding (2) make each app unique and easy to identify.
•
Your users can access other items and apps by clicking the App Launcher icon (3) or the app name.
•
Your users can create records and access recent records and lists directly from the navigation bar (4) for items like Opportunities.
The items in an app are always just one click away in the navigation bar.
What can you put in the Lightning app navigation bar?
If you’re familiar with Salesforce Classic, you know that Classic apps can contain:
•
Most standard objects, including Home, the main Chatter feed, Groups, and People
•
Your org’s custom objects
•
Visualforce tabs
•
Lightning component tabs
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•
Canvas apps via Visualforce tabs
•
Web tabs
Lightning apps can contain everything on this list plus Lightning page tabs and utilities like Lightning
Voice. If your org uses utility features, you can enable a utility bar in your app that allows instant access to productivity tools, like integrated voice, in the Lightning Experience footer.
Find Items and Apps in the App Launcher
With the App Launcher, your users can switch between apps and access available items and features. The
App Launcher is so central to navigating Lightning Experience and its apps, we’ve positioned it within easy reach on the left side of the navigation bar. It’s available from any page.
The App Launcher displays all available apps in one place so your users can easily find what they’re looking for—even apps they didn’t know they had.
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Apps show up in the App Launcher as large tiles under All Apps (1). Other items, such as custom objects, tasks, events, and the feed, show up under All Items (2). Don’t see what you want? Search for it by name in the search box (3). Expand your search to find the latest cloud-computing apps and services available on the AppExchange (4). You can do it all with the click of a button without ever leaving Lightning
Experience.
You can make various types of apps available to your users in the App Launcher, including:
•
Salesforce apps, which include custom apps and standard apps that come with Salesforce, like Sales and Service
•
Connected apps such as Gmail
™
and Microsoft
®
Office 365
™
•
Partner and ISV apps
As an admin, you can change which apps appear on the App Launcher and the default order in which they appear. You and your users can then drag the tiles around to create your own personal view of the
App Launcher. Your users see only the apps you authorize for them to access through profiles or permission sets.
The App Launcher’s great for finding an app or item even when it’s not currently on the navigation bar.
Just click the App Launcher icon ( ) to search for it by name. For example, say you’re looking for an item called Service. Enter
Service
in the search box to see items and apps that match your search as you type.
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Meet the Lightning Experience App Manager
The App Manager in Setup is your go-to place for managing apps for Lightning Experience. It shows all your connected apps and Salesforce apps, both Classic and Lightning.
You can use the Lightning Experience App Manager to:
•
Create Lightning apps or connected apps (1)
•
See if your Classic apps are accessible to your users in Lightning Experience (2)
•
Edit, delete, or upgrade Classic apps to take advantage of all the benefits of apps in Lightning Experience
(3)
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Tip: Click a column header to sort the list based on that column.
What does that “Visible in Lightning Experience” column mean?
A checkmark in the Visible in Lightning Experience column means that the app is accessible in Lightning
Experience via the App Launcher and is fully functional.
You can toggle the availability of your Classic apps in Lightning Experience by selecting or deselecting
Show in Lightning Experience
on the Classic app’s detail page. Classic apps that have been upgraded to Lightning apps automatically have that setting disabled.
We’ve mentioned a couple of times now that you can upgrade your Classic apps. Why do that? So your apps can take advantage of all the perks of Lightning apps. We’ll get there shortly. But first, let’s get your org ready for it.
Install a Custom Classic App: The Warehouse Data
Model
We want to walk you through upgrading a Classic app to Lightning. To do that, you need to have a clean custom Classic app in your org. So we’re going to enlist an old friend for help: the enhanced Warehouse data model. You might be familiar with the Warehouse app if you’ve gone through the tutorials in the
Force.com Workbook. We took the Warehouse data from that guide and added a few extra things to it. If you’ve gone through the exercises in the Salesforce App Developer Guide, you probably already have the enhanced Warehouse app installed.
Important: Check your Developer org. If you already have the Warehouse app installed, skip these steps.
1. Go to
www.salesforce.com
and log in to Salesforce using your Developer Edition credentials.
2. Open a new browser tab or window, and navigate to
https://github.com/forcedotcom/Salesforce1-Dev-Guide-Setup-Package
.
Do this in the browser that you logged in to your Developer org with.
3. Open the README file.
4. Click the link in the README file.
This is the installation link for the enhanced Warehouse data package. You should be taken directly to the Package Installation Details page.
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5. Click Install.
6. Wait for the installation to finish, then click Done.
7. If your DE org is set to Lightning Experience, switch to Salesforce Classic.
8. From the Force.com app menu, select Warehouse.
9. Click the Data tab.
10. Click Create Data.
11. Click your name in the upper-right corner, then select Switch to Lightning Experience.
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In this chapter ...
•
•
Creating and editing a Lightning app is a cinch. As in Salesforce Classic, you can create apps in Lightning Experience, but with even more bells and whistles. You can brand and customize Lightning apps to help your users work more efficiently.
For example, you can create a Lightning app for your finance department that includes all important items (including tabs) that users need to complete common tasks. You can customize the navigation bar color, brand it with a logo, and make the app available in the App Launcher for the user profiles associated with the finance department.
Tip: If your org includes utilities like Lightning Voice or Open CTI
Softphone, you can add them to your app’s utility bar.
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Create a Lightning App
You’ve got the Warehouse app installed in your org. Let’s create a mini app for the warehouse delivery managers, who want to know what inventory is getting delivered where, whether it got there on time, and what cases related to deliveries are open.
1. From the Home tab in Setup, enter
App
in the
Quick Find
box, then select App Manager.
2. Click New Lightning App.
3. In the Lightning App Wizard, create an app with these parameters.
App name
Description
Image
Primary hex color value
App navigation
Navigation bar items (in this order)
Assigned to user profile
Delivery Tracker
Track warehouse deliveries.
Your choice! (We chose Astro.)
Use a JPG, PNG, BMP, or GIF image that’s smaller than 5 MB.
For best results, upload an image that’s 128 by 128 pixels.
Images larger than the maximum display of 128 by 128 pixels are automatically resized.
#09D4EA
Standard
Warehouses, Deliveries, Merchandise, Accounts, Contacts,
Cases, Reports
System Administrator
4. Click Save and Finish to exit the wizard.
5. Click
to open the App Launcher, and select the Delivery Tracker app.
6. Check out the new app!
It’s got all the custom branding we gave it: a custom icon in the upper left and the custom color we assigned to it. Because Warehouses is first in the navigation bar, it becomes the landing page for the app. And even though App Launcher was an item available for the navigation bar, we didn’t have to add it. It’s there, accessible by clicking .
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Nice work! Now you’re ready to create your own custom Lightning apps.
Beyond the Basics
Did you know that app images for Lightning apps can be animated GIFs? Oh yes, they can. You're welcome.
Tips for Creating Apps in Lightning Experience
It’s time for the fun part: deciding how to set up Lightning apps for your users. Here are some tips for planning Lightning apps for your org.
EDITIONS
The best time to create Lightning apps is when you’re rolling out
Lightning Experience. So make creating Lightning apps a part of your rollout strategy. Check out the Trailhead module “
Experience Rollout transition.
Lightning
” for many great ideas to help you make a smooth
Available in: Lightning
Experience
Available in: Enterprise,
Professional, Performance,
Unlimited, and Developer
Editions
Talk to your users. Ask them what their priorities are. Customizing tabs in apps gives you a unique opportunity to engage with your users. Each group of users has its own priorities. Find out which objects and items represent their highest priorities.
•
Ask users to post feedback to a Chatter group.
•
Publish polls.
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•
Schedule lunch sessions. Everyone likes a free lunch, and nearly everybody is happy to express their opinion.
Create a master list of objects that everyone in your org wants. Then trim down the list for each group—sales reps, sales managers, execs, and so on. The menus for every user group share some common objects, like
Home, Tasks, and Feed. Keep the high-priority items for each group at the top. Put low-priority items at the bottom, or remove them altogether. Users can always go to the App Launcher to get the items they use less often.
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CHAPTER 13 Take Your Classic App to the Next
Level: Lightning
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
Classic apps work in Lightning Experience. So why upgrade them to
Lightning apps? Upgrading a Classic app to a Lightning app lets you and your users take advantage of custom branding and the enhanced navigation features available in Lightning Experience.
You installed the enhanced Warehouse app into your org, but it installed as a Classic app. Let’s bring it into Lightning.
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Upgrade the Warehouse App
Even though a Classic app works in Lightning Experience, it doesn’t take advantage of all the benefits of being a Lightning app. That’s why we recommend that you upgrade it. Let’s do that now.
1. From the Home tab in Setup, enter
App
in the
Quick Find
box, then select App Manager.
2. Find the Warehouse app in the list.
3. Click
from the Warehouse app row, and select Upgrade.
4. Leave the suggested “Warehouse Lightning” name as-is, and click Upgrade.
Your Classic app is copied and upgraded for Lightning Experience. You now have two versions of the app: a Classic version, and a Lightning version. After you upgrade it, the Classic app is no longer accessible in Lightning Experience via the App Launcher. You’ll still see the Classic app in the apps list, but with the Visible in Lightning column deselected.
After you upgrade a Classic app, the two versions of the app must be managed separately. Future changes you make to the Classic app won’t be reflected in the Lightning version of the app, and vice versa.
Give the Warehouse App That Touch of Lightning
You’ve upgraded the Warehouse app, but it’s not taking advantage of the great enhancements that
Lightning apps can offer. Let’s fix that.
1. Find the Warehouse Lightning app in the list.
2. Click
from the Warehouse Lightning app row, and select Edit.
3. Update the description to
Manage inventory and deliveries for our warehouses.
The app description displays alongside the icon in the App Launcher, so it’s a great way to tell your users what the app is for, but keep it brief.
4. In the App Branding section, change the Primary Color Hex Value to
#EE1518
.
You can see a preview of the default app icon using the red color we assigned and what the app tile will look like in the App Launcher.
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5. Click Save.
6. Click the Select Items tab, and remove the Data and Home tabs from the Selected Items list.
That leaves the Chatter tab at the top of the list, which means it becomes the app’s landing page.
7. Add Cases to the Selected Items list, and move it to directly after Accounts.
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Tip: If you have Lightning pages in your org, you can see them in the Available Items list.
Being able to add Lightning pages to the navigation bar is another great perk about
Lightning apps.
8. Click Save.
9. Click the Assign to User Profiles tab, and make sure that System Administrator is in the Selected
Items list.
10. Click Done.
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Look at the Warehouse App Now
Let’s look at the changes we made to the Warehouse app.
1. Click
from the app navigation bar.
There’s the Warehouse Lightning app.
2. Click the Warehouse Lightning app.
If the “Welcome to Salesforce” Setup Assistant dialog appears, close it.
You’re in the updated Warehouse app. It’s got Chatter as the landing page, Cases right after
Accounts, and the bright red color we gave it.
Good job! You’ve got the skills. Now go create and update some apps in your own org.
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CREATE CUSTOM PAGES FOR LIGHTNING
EXPERIENCE
CHAPTER 14 Meet the Lightning App Builder
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
Your users are busy. They’re closing deals, providing top-notch service, and marketing to your prospects and customers. By creating customized pages, you can put key information at your users’ fingertips and provide them with an easy interface to update and add records.
The Lightning App Builder is a point-and-click tool that makes it easy to create custom pages for the Salesforce app and Lightning Experience.
With the Lightning App Builder, you can combine various components on a single page to give your users what they need all in one place.
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How the Lightning App Builder Works
With the Lightning App Builder, you can build:
•
Single-page apps that drill down into standard pages
•
Dashboard-style apps, such as apps to track top sales prospects or key leads for the quarter
•
“Point” apps to solve a particular task, such as an expense app for users to enter expenses and monitor expenses they’ve submitted
•
Custom record pages for your objects, tailored to the needs of your users
•
Custom Home pages containing the components and features that your users use most
Lightning pages are the underlying technology for the Lightning App Builder. A Lightning page is a custom layout that lets you design pages for use in the Salesforce app or in Lightning Experience. A Lightning page is composed of regions that contain components.
Here’s a sneak peek at one of the pages you’re going to build.
The structure of a Lightning page adapts for the device it’s viewed on. The template you choose when creating the page controls how it displays on a given device. The Lightning page’s template divides the page into regions.
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Lightning Components
A Lightning component is a compact, configurable, and reusable element that you can drag and drop onto a Lightning page in the Lightning App Builder.
You can use standard, custom, and third-party components in the Lightning App Builder.
Standard Components
Standard components are Lightning components built by Salesforce.
Custom Components
Custom components are Lightning components that you or someone else have created. With some modifications, custom Lightning components can work in the Lightning App Builder. For more information on making Lightning components App Builder–friendly, see the
Lightning Components
Developer Guide
.
Third-Party Components on AppExchange
The AppExchange provides a marketplace for Lightning components. You can find packages containing components already configured and ready to use in the Lightning App Builder.
The Lightning App Builder User Interface
The Lightning App Builder’s user interface makes creating Lightning pages easy. Here’s a breakdown of the parts of the tool.
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Header (1)
The header shows you the label of your Lightning page. You can also return to Setup without saving or to view more help for the Lightning App Builder.
Toolbar (2)
Use the buttons in the toolbar to cut ( ), copy ( ), and paste ( ) page content; and to undo ( ), redo ( ), save, or activate your Lightning page. You can also view your page in different formats, refresh the canvas, or adjust the canvas size to fit your view.
Lightning Components Pane (3)
The components pane contains all standard and custom Lightning components that are supported for your Lightning page. Click and drag a component to add it to the page.
Tip: If you have a lot of custom components, enter text in the search field to easily find the one you need. You can access third-party custom components on the AppExchange using the button at the bottom of the pane.
Lightning Page Canvas (4)
The canvas area is where you build your page. Drag components to reorder them on the page.
Properties Pane (5)
Depending on what you select on the page, the properties pane shows either the overall page properties or the properties of the component that you’ve selected. Click Page in the breadcrumb to access the page properties when viewing a component.
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Lightning Page Types
You can create different types of Lightning pages with the Lightning App Builder. In this module, we'll look at these three types.
App Page
Use an app page to create a home page for a third-party app that you can add directly into the Salesforce app and Lightning Experience navigation menus. Your users then have an app home page where they can quickly access the most important objects and items.
Home Page
Create Home pages with features relevant to specific types of users, and assign the customized pages to different user profiles. Custom Home pages are supported in Lightning Experience only.
Record Page
With a record page, you can create a customized version of an object’s record page, tailoring it to your users’ needs. Custom record pages are supported in Lightning Experience only.
Let’s start with the Home page.
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Your Lightning Experience Home
Page
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
Give your users everything they need to manage their day from the Home page in Lightning Experience. Your sales reps can see their quarterly performance summary and get important updates on critical tasks and opportunities. You can also customize the page for different types of users and assign custom pages for different profiles.
You can create a custom Home page in two ways: Create it from scratch using a template, or edit an existing page.
To edit an existing page, you can click from the Home page, and then select Edit Page to create a copy of the current page to edit. If a customized page exists and is active, selecting Edit Page opens that page to edit.
We’re going to create a Home page from scratch.
Beyond the Basics
When you select Edit Page for the first time, Salesforce makes a copy of the standard page. This copy is what you then edit in the
Lightning App Builder. Pages created like this—as copies—retain
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Chapter 15 Yes, Virginia, You Can Customize Your Lightning Experience Home Page a reference to the standard page, which means that Salesforce can upgrade the page copies for you with new capabilities in the future.
If you create a page from scratch, then you own it completely and new page capabilities Salesforce rolls out won’t appear automatically.
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Create a Custom Home Page
We’ll tweak the position of the components on the standard Home page layout slightly to give you an idea of what’s possible.
Let’s get started!
1. From Setup, enter
App Builder
in the Quick Find box, then select Lightning App Builder.
2. Click New, and select Home Page.
3. Step through the wizard and name the page
New Home Page
, select the standard home page template, and then click Finish.
The components pane contains all the standard components available for the Home page.
4. Drag the Assistant component to the top right region.
5. Drag Quarterly Performance to the top left region.
6. Add Today’s Events to the lower left region and add Top Deals to the lower right region.
7. Add Today’s Tasks above the Assistant.
8. Click Save.
But wait, what’s this? There’s more? Yes, there is. Saving the page isn’t enough to get it out to your users. Lightning pages must be activated before your users can see them.
Normally, if you aren’t done with your page, or aren’t ready to make it public, you can click Not
Yet here to save the page and return to the App Builder. But that’s not us. We’re bold! We’re done
with our page and want to give it to our users right now!
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9. Click Activate, and we’ll do just that.
Tip: If you saved previously and didn’t activate the page, you can click the Activation button in the toolbar to be ready for the next section.
Roll Out Your Custom Home Page to Your Lightning
Experience Users
When activating a Home page, you have two options: You can make it the default for everyone, or assign it to one or more profiles, giving your users access to a page designed just for their role.
Let’s assign this home page to the System Administrator profile so we can go look at it afterward.
1. Select
Assign this Home page to specific profiles
, then click Next.
2. Scroll down the list of profiles and select
System Administrator
.
3. Click Next, review the assignment, and then click Activate.
That’s it. Let’s go take a look.
Look at Your Handiwork
Just for reference, here’s an example of the standard default Home page. Think of this as the “before” in this Home page makeover.
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Now, let’s compare it to what we did.
1. Navigate to the Lightning Experience home page.
Here’s what the Home page looks like now:
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2. Bask in the glory of your newfound page customization skills.
All right! Let’s move on to record pages.
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CHAPTER 16 Those Lightning Experience Record
Pages? You Can Customize Them,
Too!
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
Use the Lightning App Builder to add, remove, or reorder components on a record page to give users a customized view for each object’s records.
Even cooler, you can customize a record page and assign it to specific
Lightning apps to give your users access to a unique record page customized especially for the context of the app they’re working in.
Just like the Home page, you can create a custom record page in two ways:
Create it from scratch using a template, or edit an existing page. We’re going to create a record page using a template.
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Create a Custom Lightning Record Page
Let’s build a custom opportunity record page from scratch.
We’ll tweak the standard record page layout just a bit, so you can get a feel for how things go together.
Once you’re comfortable with that, you can go to town and customize your record pages any way you like. Let’s get started.
1. From Setup, enter
App Builder
in the Quick Find box, then select Lightning App Builder.
2. Click New.
3. Select Record Page.
4. Name your page
New Opportunity Page
, and select Opportunity.
5. Choose the Header, Subheader, Right Sidebar template on the next screen, and click Finish.
In the components pane, you see all the standard components available for opportunity record pages and any custom components that you’ve installed in your org.
6. Drag the Highlights Panel component into the top region of the page.
Click See How It Works in the component properties pane to find out where the highlights panel content comes from.
7. Add the Path component to the region below the highlights panel.
8. Add a Chatter component to the lower right region.
9. Add a Tabs component to the lower left region.
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The Tabs component comes with some default tabs already in place. Let’s add more.
10. In the Tabs component details pane, click Add Tab.
By default, another Details tab is added. But since we already have one, let’s change this new one to something else.
11. Click the second Details tab. From the Tab Label drop-down menu, select Custom, and give the
tab a new label:
Recent Items
.
12. Click Done.
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13. Create an Activity tab.
14. Drag the Recent Items tab to the top of the Tabs list in the properties pane.
The Recent Items tab is now in the first position in the tabs component. You can click around between the tabs, but nothing changes because the tabs don’t have any components assigned to them. They’re empty. Let’s fix that.
To add a component to a tab, select the tab on the canvas and then drop a component directly below it.
15. Select the Details tab.
16. Drag a Record Detail component right below the Details tab, into the green highlighted area.
17. Add a Related Lists component to the Related tab, an Activities component to the Activity tab,
and the Recent Items component to the Recent Items tab.
18. Select the tabs component on the canvas, and in the properties pane, change the order of the
tabs to: Details, Activity, Recent Items, and Related.
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You can’t drag the tabs inside the component to move them around. You can only adjust them in the properties pane.
19. Click Save.
Roll Out Your Custom Record Page to Your Lightning
Experience Users
It’s time to spread the awesomeness! Let’s activate the page. It’s super easy.
You have three options for activation.
•
Make the page the org default for the object.
•
Make the page the default object record page for specific Lightning apps.
•
Assign the page to a combination of Lightning apps, record types, and profiles.
Let’s assign this page to a specific app, record type, and profile.
1. Click the App, Record Type, and Profile tab.
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2. Click Assign to Apps, Record Types, and Profiles.
3. Assign the page to the Sales app, the Master record type, and the System Administrator profile.
4. Review the page assignment.
The New Page column is populated with the name of the page we’re activating: New Opportunity
Page.
5. Click Save.
See? Easy peasy. Your customized record page is now live. Let’s go check it out.
Tip: You may be thinking, “This is great, but what if I change my mind? How do I deactivate my custom page?” That’s easy, too. Click Activation, click the App, Record Type, and Profile tab, and click Remove Assignments.
See What You Did There?
You’ve created a page and activated it. Now let’s see it in action.
1. Click Back in the App Builder header.
2. From the App Launcher (
), open the Sales app, and click the Opportunities tab.
3. Select any opportunity with an amount below $1,000,000.
You might have to refresh the opportunity page for the record page changes to show up.
Here’s what the custom record page looks like, using the sample company, United Oil Refinery
Generators. Because you assigned the record page to the System Administrator profile, you can see it, but no other users in your org can. You can customize your different users’ experiences by creating custom record pages and assigning them by app, record type, and user profile. Give your sales managers a different view of opportunities than your sales reps. Configure nonprofit account pages differently than standard business account pages.
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Don’t see the rich text component that you added to the page? That’s because the opportunity doesn’t meet the criteria that you set. Let’s change that.
4. From the page level actions in the Highlights panel, select Edit.
5. Change the opportunity’s amount to be over $1,000,000, change the stage to Closed Won, then
click Save.
Woohoo, look at that! You didn’t even have to refresh the page. As soon as you save your changes and the filter criteria are met, the page automatically updates to show the rich text component and its message.
You did it! You’ve taken your first steps into a larger world.
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Let’s move on to app pages.
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CHAPTER 17 The App Home Lightning Page
In this chapter ...
•
•
Add Your App Page to Lightning
•
Test Your App Page in the Salesforce App
•
Test Your App Page in Lightning
Add a custom home page for an app to the Salesforce app navigation list and the Lightning Experience app navigation bar to let your users easily access the objects and items that are most important in that app.
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Create an App Page
Let’s build an app home page for a sales team.
Your sales team needs to see top deals in the pipeline, with a visual interface that makes it easy to absorb key details at a glance. They want to see the most recent opportunities they’ve viewed and be able to drill into the record details with a single tap or click. And they want functionality to log calls and create accounts and opportunities on the go.
Let’s get started!
1. From Setup, enter
App Builder
in the Quick Find box, then select Lightning App Builder.
2. Click New.
3. Select App Page, and then click Next.
4. Name your Lightning page
Top Accounts and Opportunities
.
5. Select the Two Columns template and click Finish.
If the Lightning App Builder walkthrough pops up, dismiss it.
Although you selected a two-column template, the canvas shows only one column. When you create an app page, the mode defaults to Phone.
6. Drag the List View component into the top region.
7. In the properties pane, select the Platinum and Gold SLA Customers view.
8. Add a Recent Items component into the second region.
9. In the properties pane for the Recent Items component, click Select and add the Opportunity
object to it.
10. In the properties pane, click Page, click Select, and then add these actions to the page.
•
Log a Call
•
New Account
•
New Opportunity
You can add only global actions to a Lightning page.
11. From the toolbar, change the Phone view to Tablet-Landscape.
12. Click Save, and then Not Yet.
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Now that you’ve created your page, you’re almost ready to add it to Lightning Experience and the mobile app.
Add Your App Page to Lightning Experience and the
Salesforce app
Just like the other pages, your users can’t access your app page until you activate it. During activation, you can customize the page’s custom tab label, adjust its visibility, and set its position in the Salesforce app navigation list and Lightning Experience app navigation bars, all in one place.
1. Click Activation.
2. Don’t change the app name.
By default, the label that you give the Lightning page is used as the label for its custom tab.
3. Change the icon to the blue lightning bolt icon.
The icon that you choose here is used as the icon for the app and for the page in Lightning
Experience.
4. Keep the tab’s visibility open to all users.
Tip: The
Activate for the System Administrator profile only setting is useful while you’re working on your Lightning page. Restricting your page to
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Chapter 17 The App Home Lightning Page administrators only means that you can see and test the page, but your users can’t see it until you’re ready to expose it to them.
5. Click the Lightning Experience tab.
6. Select a Lightning App, and click Add page to app.
The page you’re adding to the menu appears in the second position by default. Let’s leave it there.
If you put it into the top position, it becomes the landing page for all your Lightning Experience users.
7. Click the Salesforce tab.
8. Select the Salesforce Navigation Menu, and click Add page to app.
By default, new pages you add to the Salesforce app menu appear below the Smart Search Items menu item. If you leave the Top Accounts and Opportunities page there, it will appear in the Apps section of the menu. We don’t want that, so let’s move it up.
9. Drag the page to below the Today menu item.
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10. Click Save.
Your app home page is now ready for your mobile and Lightning Experience users!
Test Your App Page in the Salesforce App
You’ve created your page and activated it. Now let’s see it in action!
1. Open the Salesforce app on your mobile device.
2. Log in using your Developer Edition credentials.
3. Tap
to access the navigation menu.
4. Select Top Accounts and Opportunities.
Here’s your Lightning page! It has the lightning bolt icon you chose, and the three actions that you added are in the action bar.
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5. Play around with your page. Scroll up and down to see the components, and tap an action icon
to see what happens.
Test Your App Page in Lightning Experience
Now let’s look at it in Lightning Experience.
1. Go back to your desktop browser and your Developer org.
2. If you’re still in the App Builder, click Back to return to Setup.
3. From the App Launcher (
), open the Lightning app you assigned your page to.
4. Click Top Accounts and Opportunities from the app navigation bar.
Here’s your Lightning page! The lightning bolt icon appears here too, and the three actions that you added are in the highlights panel.
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MIGRATE JAVASCRIPT BUTTON
FUNCTIONALITY TO LIGHTNING
CHAPTER 18 JavaScript Buttons: It’s Time to Move
On
In this chapter ...
•
We know that you love JavaScript buttons and have been using them in
Salesforce Classic for years. In fact, you might be reluctant to migrate to
Lightning Experience because JavaScript buttons aren’t supported. But
Lightning Experience offers so much more than Salesforce Classic, and it is the future. We realize that you expect and rely on us to always migrate existing functionality to new features and UI, but in the case of JavaScript buttons, we believe that the future is brighter in Lightning Experience, even without JavaScript button support. And in this module, we show you why.
JavaScript buttons and links are types of actions in the Salesforce Classic
UI that let you create inline JavaScript code that can be invoked via a button or link embedded on a record or list page. For example, maybe you prepopulate new records with data upon creation and update values in fields based on other logic. Or maybe you’re a Salesforce partner who uses custom buttons to integrate with your platform.
If JavaScript buttons are so useful, why don’t we support them in Lightning
Experience? Because there are significant security challenges with combining untrusted JavaScript from multiple sources and authors together with the application source code, while maintaining trust.
We’ll cover those security and functional challenges, and share with you the alternatives to JavaScript buttons that are mobile- and
Lightning-friendly. We’ll also look at features in Salesforce that you can use to migrate the functionality that you’ve built using custom buttons.
We’re committed to solving the problem of client-side customization and integration. Let us show you a new approach to thinking about JavaScript button functionality in Lightning Experience.
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JavaScript Button Security Issues and Use Cases
One of the coolest benefits of Lightning Experience is that you can add your custom Lightning components to record, Home, and other pages. For example, you might choose to add a map component to your
Account record pages. Or, you could provide a component for your AppExchange app that can be added to the Home page or an Opportunity record.
However, without some safeguards, the components have access to each other’s data, shared access to the window and event structures, and access to any client-side API. A partner’s component for HIPAA compliance or financial information, for example, could be accessed by a component from a different source when both components are on the same page. As you can imagine, this cross-component access could lead to security and regulatory issues.
What’s Up with Inline JavaScript
Before we discuss the safeguards that Salesforce has in place for Lightning component security, let’s highlight some of the issues with in-line JavaScript. JavaScript is a loosely typed programming language, supported by all modern web browsers without a plug-in. It can persist data and state through cookies and storage APIs, and it can access events, URLs, and cookies through the browser. What makes JavaScript both useful and dangerous is that it has full access to the Document Object Model (DOM) and Browser
Object Model (BOM).
With access to the DOM, a programmer can add, change, or delete almost anything found in an HTML or
XML document. In the right hands, this is useful because JavaScript provides an API for working with text, dates, and regular expressions, so it’s easy to add client-side functionality with JavaScript snippets that enhance the base user interface. However, this is also a significant vulnerability because with Cross Site
Scripting (XSS), malicious actors can gain access via JavaScript to the DOM or BOM and wreak havoc.
When a website enables dynamic content, hackers can use XSS to inject malicious client-side code into the web pages that are viewed by normal users. The hackers can then harness a user’s session and cookies to run scripts to extract data, log keystrokes, manipulate form entries, and even access APIs.
LockerService: Making Lightning Components More Secure
The good news is that Salesforce is already working on a solution to make Lightning components more secure and restrict JavaScript’s unfettered access. This solution is LockerService, which uses various technologies and techniques that are intended to prevent:
•
XSS and similar security issues
•
Unrestricted DOM access
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•
Calls to undocumented/private APIs
At the same time, LockerService’s features also enable:
•
Client-side API versioning
•
Faster security review (AppExchange)
•
Better JavaScript development practices
•
Easy updates to security features and policies
So you now know that Lightning components are built to be more secure. But how can you benefit from using them, and how can you re-create your JavaScript button functionality within Lightning Experience?
We’ll show you shortly. But first, let’s look at how you might be using JavaScript buttons in Salesforce
Classic.
What People Are Doing with JavaScript Buttons
We heard from many customers, some with hundreds of JavaScript buttons in their orgs. We also talked to partners about their JavaScript button use cases. We collated what we learned into a broader set of operations. Here are the most common use cases for JavaScript buttons.
•
Use or manipulate values on a record before the save
–
Validate fields—ensure that values are populated and/or meet criteria
–
Prefill values based on inputs in other fields
–
Redirect to a Visualforce page based on input values
–
Display confirmation pop-up screens
•
Create records with prepopulated values
•
Trigger flows from Visual Workflow
•
Call out to Salesforce or external APIs
•
Integrate with third parties
•
Perform mass actions on records in a list
•
Direct methods and procedures via feedback pop-up screens for users
There are more scenarios, and some use cases that are so specific to an org that they’re impossible to categorize. Coming up, we’ll cover features that you can use to address all the use cases we mentioned, and migrate JavaScript button functionality to the Salesforce app and Lightning Experience.
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Alternatives
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
•
Previously, we explained why it’s time to migrate to Lightning Experience, where great new features let you move past JavaScript buttons. Next, we’ll explain how you can easily migrate your custom JavaScript button functionality using solutions that work in both Salesforce Classic and
Lightning Experience.
This table maps use cases for JavaScript buttons to alternate—and in most cases, better—solutions in Lightning.
JavaScript Button
Top Use Cases
Validate fields
(presave)
Lightning
Alternatives
Quick actions (using default values and/or formulas)
Declarative/Programmatic
D
P
D Create records with prepopulated values
Apex triggers
Quick actions (using default values and/or formulas)
Custom URL buttons Redirect to a record page
Redirect to a
Visualforce page
Visualforce quick actions
Lightning actions
Prefill values based on inputs
Lightning actions
D
P
P
P
Confirmation pop-up screens
Lightning actions P
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JavaScript Button
Top Use Cases
API calls (Salesforce and third-party)
Feedback pop-up screens
Lightning
Alternatives
Lightning actions
Lightning actions
Third-party integration Lightning actions
Mass actions on list view records
Custom Visualforce buttons on list views
Declarative/Programmatic
P
P
P
P
As you can see, Salesforce offers several declarative tools for converting the functionality of your JavaScript custom buttons.
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Quick Actions
Quick actions support many of the common uses of JavaScript buttons. Quick actions can be based on a specific object or can be global, meaning that they’re more generic and accessible from any record or the
Chatter feed. There’s a quick action to do just about anything in Salesforce. Here are some examples.
Validate Field Values
Sometimes you want to make sure that certain fields are filled in or populated with specific criteria when your users create or update records.
Let’s say you want to create an action for closing a task without requiring users to go to a full edit page.
But you also want to make sure that the task has a due date before it can be closed.
You can fulfill all these requirements by creating a quick action for the Task object.
1. From the Object Manager in Setup, click Task, then click Buttons, Links, and Actions.
2. Click New Action.
3. For Action Type, select Update a Record.
4. For Label, type in
Close Task
.
5. Click Save.
Now we select the fields that we want to appear on the Close Task quick action. You can easily make a field required or read-only through its field properties.
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After you set the fields on the action layout, you can add predefined field values for any of the fields on the task record. In this example, we marked the Due Date field as required. We also added a predefined value for the Status field to be changed to Completed.
Now that we’re done configuring the action, we add it to the Task page layout. Then users can access it from a task record page in both Lightning Experience and the Salesforce app. Here’s an example of a Close
Task action on the Tasks page.
Clicking Close Task brings up the action, which the user can quickly act upon and save.
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Here’s what it looks like in the Salesforce app.
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Prepopulate Fields with Values
A more advanced use case is when you want to let users create a record, but you also want one or more of the fields to be populated automatically based on values in a dependent field.
For example, let’s say your inside sales team’s typical quarterly quota is one fourth of their customers’ revenues from last year, increased by 10%. Because that simple formula doesn’t always apply, you want to prefill the opportunity amount with the value, but also let the user modify it. Create an action so your users can modify the field quickly and efficiently without going to the full opportunity record page.
To create this sample action, you follow the same steps as before for creating the opportunity quick action.
1. From the Object Manager in Setup, click Account, then Buttons, Links, and Actions.
2. Click New Action.
3. For Action Type, select Create a Record.
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4. For Target Object, select Opportunity.
5. Pick the appropriate Record Type.
6. For Label, enter
New Oppty
.
7. Click Save.
Once you’ve picked the fields for the action layout, you can add predefined values for the Amount field.
In our example, we’ve used this formula:
Account.Last_Year_Revenue_Generated__c
* 1.10
/ 4
Add this action to the Account page layout. When users invoke it, they see a value prepopulated in the field that they can accept or override.
The cool thing about this action is that you can pull data from the opportunity’s account to use when creating the opportunity. Salesforce also supports record traversal, so if you have hierarchical accounts, you can pull the revenues from the parent account like this:
Account.Parent.Last_Year_Revenue_Generated__c
Don’t worry about remembering the formula formats; quick actions are declarative and use the Salesforce formula builder.
Redirect to a Visualforce Page Based on Input Values
You can create Visualforce pages to enhance your business processes. Users can navigate to these Visualforce pages in various ways, such as with custom buttons, action overrides, and tabs.
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One benefit of Visualforce pages is that by using the standard controller, you can create customized record pages and add prevalidation, prepopulated fields, formulas, and much more.
JavaScript buttons are commonly used in Salesforce Classic to read and pass values from a record into a
URL that then redirects users to a Visualforce page. You can also give your users access to Visualforce pages via quick actions. Creating Visualforce quick actions is easy, and a similar process to what we’ve already covered. The only difference is that you select Custom Visualforce as the action type.
For object-specific Visualforce quick actions, you must include the standardController
for the object in your Visualforce page to gain access to the record data and have the Visualforce page appear in the quick action picklist.
Custom URL Buttons and Links
Maybe you use JavaScript buttons for navigation, redirecting users to another page with the command window.open(URL)
and some variables. In most cases, you can use custom URL buttons or links in
Lightning Experience instead.
Here’s a list of different URL buttons and links, and their redirect behavior in Lightning Experience.
Custom URL Button or Link
External URL
Lightning Experience Behavior
URL opens in new tab
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Custom URL Button or Link
www.google.com
Relative Salesforce URL, View
/{!Account.Id}
Relative Salesforce URL, Edit
/{!Account.Id}/e
Relative Salesforce URL, List
/001/o
$Action URL, View
{!URLFOR($Action.Account.View,
Account.Id)}
$Action URL, Edit
{!URLFOR($Action.Account.Edit,
Account.Id)}
Lightning Experience Behavior
Record home page opens in existing tab
Edit overlay pops up on the existing page
Object home page opens in existing tab
Record home page opens in existing tab
Edit overlay pops up on the existing page
Apex Triggers
You might be familiar with Apex triggers; they’ve been supported on our platform for years. Apex triggers can be configured to execute before or after a user clicks Save on a record.
When you need presave validation, calculation, and population of fields, consider using Apex triggers.
They’re especially useful for third-party integration, because the rules are enforced through the Salesforce
API across Salesforce Classic, Lightning Experience, and the Salesforce app.
For more information on Apex triggers, you can check out the
Apex Developer Guide
or earn the Apex
Triggers badge .
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Custom Visualforce Buttons
Another great feature in Lightning Experience is support for using Visualforce buttons on list views. With this feature, you can use existing Visualforce actions in Lightning and work with multiple records in lists.
Here’s how.
1. Create your Visualforce page.
Here is sample code for editing the Stage and Close dates for multiple opportunities:
<apex:page standardController= "Opportunity" recordSetVar= "opportunities" extensions= "tenPageSizeExt" >
<apex:form >
<apex:pageBlock title= "Edit Stage and Close Date" mode= "edit" >
<apex:pageMessages />
<apex:pageBlockButtons location= "top" >
<apex:commandButton value= "Save" action= "{!save}" />
<apex:commandButton value= "Cancel" action= "{!cancel}" />
</apex:pageBlockButtons >
<apex:pageBlockTable value= "{!selected}" var= "opp" >
<apex:column value= "{!opp.name}" />
<apex:column headerValue= "Stage" >
<apex:inputField value= "{!opp.stageName}" />
</apex:column >
<apex:column headerValue= "Close Date" >
<apex:inputField value= "{!opp.closeDate}" />
</apex:column >
</apex:pageBlockTable >
</apex:pageBlock >
</apex:form >
</apex:page >
2. Create a custom button that references your Visualforce page.
3. Add the action to your list view.
Note: Mass actions aren’t supported on the Recently Viewed records list. They are only available on list views.
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Example: Here’s how that action shows up in Lightning Experience.
As you can see from our examples, Salesforce has a great set of features that allow you to migrate your
JavaScript button functionality and move to Lightning Experience.
Now, you may have a lot of JavaScript buttons that have accumulated in your org over the years. You might expect that the migration or conversion process will take a long time. But the job might not be as hard as you think. We did an analysis of JavaScript buttons in the internal Salesforce org that all our employees use. We found that many buttons were obsolete or rarely invoked by users. Others were simply duplicates—the same button but on different objects. After going through the list, we discovered that many of the JavaScript buttons could be converted to the solutions we’ve looked at so far. For the remainder, we could address quite a few with the new Lightning Actions.
You probably noticed Lightning actions in the list of programmatic solutions as a common replacement for many of the JavaScript button use cases. Lightning actions are easy to build, because they’re based on the quick action framework. You set them up similar to Visualforce quick actions. We’ll cover Lightning actions more in depth next.
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Mobile
In this chapter ...
•
Based on User Input and Provide
•
We've covered several solutions that work in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic and that are great replacements for JavaScript buttons. But we recognize that those declarative and programmatic solutions don’t address every use case. The good news is that there’s something that addresses many more. Introducing Lightning actions: quick actions that call Lightning components.
Lightning actions are built on the existing Lightning Component
Framework that you may already have adopted. You can easily convert your existing Lightning components to actions and use them in the
Salesforce app and Lightning Experience.
You make a Lightning component invokable as an action by adding one of two interfaces to the component: force:lightningQuickAction
or force:lightningQuickActionWithoutHeader
. The first interface adds the standard header with Save and Cancel buttons to the
Lightning action overlay, and the other doesn’t.
Another useful interface for a Lightning action is force:hasRecordId
, which provides the record context to the component when it’s invoked from a record page. If you set up your Lightning action as a global quick action, you don’t need the record context. However, if you want to access a record’s data or metadata, you must implement force:hasRecordId
.
Note: If you haven’t built Lightning components before, visit the
Lightning Development Center , do the Lightning Component Quick
Start project, and complete the Lightning Components Basics module.
Let’s dive into Lightning actions. Next, we’ll talk about some JavaScript button functionality that can be addressed with Lightning actions instead.
•
Populating fields based on user input and providing feedback messages during data entry
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•
Integrating third-party APIs
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Populate Fields Based on User Input and Provide
Feedback Messages to Users
Let’s say you use JavaScript buttons to validate or manipulate data and give your users feedback or instructions when they work with records. Here’s an example to show how easily you can validate or manipulate data in a Lightning component before your users create or update a record.
We’ve built a custom object in our sample org called Case Study, which we use to track different research projects. When we add new test users, we capture their names and email addresses. Since the email address is our primary contact method, we want to make sure it’s entered correctly. We also want to create a unique nickname for test users so that they can remain anonymous.
We’re going to create a Lightning action that displays the name and email address fields, validates the email address, and uses the first name and a random number to automatically create the nickname.
Here’s the code for the component called by this Lightning action.
•
CreateUser.cmp
—The Lightning component that you see when you open the action. It contains the UI implementation, which includes the text fields, buttons, action title, and so on.
•
CreateUserController.js
—The controller that listens to the component and any UI events that take place, such as the initial load, text input, and button clicks. Its function is to delegate these events to the helper class,
CreateUserHelper.js
.
•
CreateUserHelper.js
—The code that deals with all the business logic, such as validating the password and email fields, and communicating with the server-side Apex controller, which saves the data.
•
SaveTestUser.apxc
—A simple Apex controller that handles the request to create a test user.
CreateUser.cmp
<aura:component implements="force:lightningQuickActionWithoutHeader,force:hasRecordId" controller="SaveTestUser" >
<aura:attribute name="user" type="Test_User__c" default="{
'sobjectType': 'Test_User__c' }"/>
<aura:attribute name="hasErrors" type="Boolean" description="Indicate whether there were failures or not" />
<aura:attribute name="caseStudy" type="String" />
<aura:attribute name="recordId" type="String"/>
<aura:handler name="init" value="{!this}" action="{!c.init}" />
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<div class="slds-page-header" role="banner">
<p class="slds-text-heading--label">Case Study</p>
<h1 class="slds-page-header__title slds-m-right--small slds-truncate slds-align-left" title="Case Study
Title">{!v.caseStudy}</h1>
</div>
<br/>
<aura:if isTrue="{!v.hasErrors}">
<!-- Load error -->
<div class="userCreateError">
<ui:message title="Error" severity="error" closable="true">
Please review the error messages.
</ui:message>
</div>
</aura:if>
<div class="slds-form--stacked">
<div class="slds-form-element">
<label class="slds-form-element__label" for="firstName">Enter first name: </label>
<div class="slds-form-element__control">
<ui:inputText class="slds-input" aura:id="firstName" value="{!v.user.first}" required="true" keydown="{!c.updateNickname}" updateOn="keydown"/>
</div>
</div>
<div class="slds-form-element">
<label class="slds-form-element__label" for="lastName">Enter last name: </label>
<div class="slds-form-element__control">
<ui:inputText class="slds-input" aura:id="lastName" value="{!v.user.last}" required="true" />
</div>
</div>
<div class="slds-form-element">
<label class="slds-form-element__label" for="nickname">Enter nickname: </label>
<div class="slds-form-element__control">
<ui:inputText class="slds-input" aura:id="nickname"
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Chapter 20 Lightning Actions: Smart, Fast, and Mobile value="{!v.user.nickname}" required="false"/>
</div>
</div>
<div class="slds-form-element">
<label class="slds-form-element__label" for="userEmail">Enter user's email:</label>
<div class="slds-form-element__control">
<ui:inputEmail class="slds-input" aura:id="userEmail" value="{!v.user.Email__c}" required="true"/>
</div>
</div>
<div class="slds-form-element">
<label class="slds-form-element__label" for="userPassword">Enter user's password:</label>
<div class="slds-form-element__control">
<ui:inputSecret class="slds-input" aura:id="userPassword" value="{!v.user.Password__c}" required="true"/>
</div>
</div>
<div class="slds-form-element">
<ui:button class="slds-button slds-button--neutral" press="{!c.cancel}" label="Cancel" />
<ui:button class="slds-button slds-button--brand" press="{!c.saveUserForm}" label="Save User" />
</div>
</div>
</aura:component>
CreateUserController.js
({ init : function(component, event, helper) { var action = component.get("c.getCaseStudy"); action.setParams({"recordId": component.get("v.recordId")}); action.setCallback(this, function(response) { var state = response.getState(); if(component.isValid() && state == "SUCCESS"){
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Chapter 20 Lightning Actions: Smart, Fast, and Mobile component.set("v.caseStudy", response.getReturnValue());
'+state);
}
});
$A.enqueueAction(action);
},
} else { console.log('There was a problem and the state is: updateNickname: function(component, event, helper) {
// Update the nickname field when 'tab' is pressed if (event.getParams().keyCode == 9) { var nameInput = component.find("firstName"); var nameValue = nameInput.get("v.value"); var nickName = component.find("nickname"); var today = new Date(); nickName.set("v.value", nameValue + today.valueOf(today));
},
} saveUserForm : function(component, event, helper) { var name = component.get("v.user.first"); var last = component.get("v.user.last"); var password = component.get("v.user.Password__c"); var email = component.get("v.user.Email__c"); var nickname = component.get("v.user.nickname"); var passwordCmp = component.find("userPassword"); var emailCmp = component.find("userEmail"); helper.validatePassword(component, event, helper); helper.validateEmail(component, event, helper); if (passwordCmp.get("v.errors") == null && emailCmp.get("v.errors") == null) { component.set("v.hasErrors", false); helper.save(component,name + " " + last,password,email,nickname);
} else { component.set("v.hasErrors", true);
}
},
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}) cancel : function(component, event, helper) {
$A.get("e.force:closeQuickAction").fire();
}
CreateUserHelper.js
({ save: function(component, name, password, email, nickname) {
//Save the user and close the panel var action = component.get("c.saveUser"); action.setParams({
"name": name,
"password": password,
"email": email,
});
"nickname": nickname,
"caseStudy": component.get("v.recordId") action.setCallback(this, function(a) { var response = a.getReturnValue(); var state = action.getState(); if(component.isValid() && state == "SUCCESS"){
$A.get("e.force:closeQuickAction").fire(); var toastEvent = $A.get("e.force:showToast"); toastEvent.setParams({
"title": "Success!",
});
"message": "The test user has been created." toastEvent.fire();
$A.get('e.force:refreshView').fire();
} else if (state == "ERROR") { console.log('There was a problem and the state is: '+ action.getState());
}
});
$A.enqueueAction(action);
}, validatePassword : function(component, event, helper) { var inputCmp = component.find("userPassword");
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Chapter 20 Lightning Actions: Smart, Fast, and Mobile var value = inputCmp.get("v.value"); if (value == undefined) { inputCmp.set("v.errors", [{message: "You must enter a password."}]);
} else if (value.length < 7 || value.length > 15) { inputCmp.set("v.errors", [{message: "The password is the wrong length: " + value}]);
} else if (value.search(/[0-9]+/) == -1) { inputCmp.set("v.errors", [{message: "The password must contain at least one number: " + value}]);
} else if (value.search(/[a-zA-Z]+/) == -1) { inputCmp.set("v.errors", [{message: "The password must contain at least one letter: " + value}]);
} else { inputCmp.set("v.errors", null);
}
}, validateEmail : function(component, event, helper) { var inputCmp = component.find("userEmail"); var value = inputCmp.get("v.value"); if (value == undefined) { inputCmp.set("v.errors", [{message: "You must enter an email."}]); return;
} var apos = value.indexOf("@"); var dotpos = value.lastIndexOf("."); if (apos<1||dotpos-apos<2){ inputCmp.set("v.errors", [{message: "Email is not in the correct format: " + value}]);
} else if (value.substring(apos+1, dotpos) != "gmail") { inputCmp.set("v.errors", [{message: "Email must be a gmail account: " + value.substring(apos+1, dotpos)}]);
} else { inputCmp.set("v.errors", null);
}
}
})
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SaveTestUser.apxc
public class SaveTestUser {
@AuraEnabled public static Test_User__c saveUser(String name, String password,
String email, String caseStudy, String nickname) {
Test_User__c testUser = new Test_User__c(Name= name,
Password__c= password, Email__c= email, Nickname__c= nickname,
Case_Study__c= caseStudy); upsert testUser; return testUser;
}
@AuraEnabled public static String getCaseStudy(String recordId) {
Case_Study__c caseStudyInstance = [SELECT Name FROM
Case_Study__c WHERE id= :recordId]; return caseStudyInstance.Name;
}
}
After creating the Lightning component, we assign it to an action. In the object management settings for
Case Study, we go to Buttons, Links, and Actions, click New Action, then configure the action with these parameters.
Field
Object Name
Action Type
Lightning Component
Height
Label
Name
Value
Case Study
Lightning Component c:CreateUser
500px
Create Test User
CreateUser
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Then we add our new Lightning action to the Case Study page layout. When users invoke it from a case study record page, they see the Lightning action that we created.
The great thing about this Lightning action is that it also works in the Salesforce app.
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Integrate Third-Party APIs
Maybe you use JavaScript buttons for integration with third-party systems. Can you use Lightning actions for that? You sure can. The primary difference is that for integration using Lightning actions, you have to use a server-side controller. In return, you get better handling of security credentials and the ability to use
Apex for asynchronous and batch API calls.
Let’s look at how to integrate with Twilio for sending SMS messages. In this example, we’re in the luxury travel business, and we handle celebrities and VIPs. We want our customer service agents to be able to communicate with their clients, but we don’t want to expose the clients’ personal contact information to anyone. We create a Lightning action on the Contact object so that agents can send messages without seeing the contact’s phone number.
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As in our case study example, we’ll create the Lightning component and helper classes, and then create a quick action to invoke the component.
This Lightning action is composed of the Lightning component, a JavaScript controller, and an Apex controller, which references library classes that handle the Twilio integration.
SendTwilioSMS.cmp
<aura:component controller="TwilioSendSMSController" implements="flexipage:availableForAllPageTypes,force:hasRecordId,force:lightningQuickAction"
>
<aura:attribute name="textMessage" type="String" />
<aura:attribute name="destinationNumber" type="String" />
<aura:attribute name="messageError" type="Boolean" />
<aura:attribute name="recordId" type="String" />
<aura:handler name="init" value="{!this}" action="{!c.init}" />
<aura:if isTrue="{!v.messageError}">
<!-- Load error -->
<div class="userCreateError">
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<ui:message title="Error" severity="error" closable="true">
Unable to send message. Please review your data and try again.
</ui:message>
</div>
</aura:if>
<div class="slds-form--stacked">
<label class="slds-form-element__label" for="instructMsg">Please enter the message (max 160 char) below: </label>
<br/>
<div class="slds-form-element__control">
<ui:inputText class="slds-input" aura:id="message" label="Text
Message" value="{!v.textMessage}" required="true" maxlength="160" size="165" />
</div>
<div class="centered">
<ui:button class="slds-button slds-button--brand" press="{!c.sendMessage}" label="Send Message"/>
</div>
</div>
</aura:component>
SendTwilioSmsController.js
({ init : function(component, event, helper) { var action = component.get("c.getPhoneNumber"); action.setParams({"contactId": component.get("v.recordId")}); action.setCallback(this, function(response) { var state = response.getState(); if(component.isValid() && state == "SUCCESS"){ component.set("v.destinationNumber", response.getReturnValue());
} else { component.set("v.messageError", true);
});
}
$A.enqueueAction(action);
}, sendMessage : function(component, event, helper) {
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Chapter 20 Lightning Actions: Smart, Fast, and Mobile var smsMessage = component.get("v.textMessage"); var number = component.get("v.destinationNumber"); var recordId = component.get("v.recordId") var action = component.get("c.sendMessages"); action.setParams({"mobNumber": number, "message": smsMessage,
"contactId": component.get("v.recordId")}); action.setCallback(this, function(response) { var state = response.getState(); if(component.isValid() && state == "SUCCESS"){
$A.get("e.force:closeQuickAction").fire(); var toastEvent = $A.get("e.force:showToast"); toastEvent.setParams({
"title": "Success!",
"message": "SMS has been sent woo hoo!"
} else { component.set("v.messageError", true);
}
}); toastEvent.fire();
});
$A.enqueueAction(action);
}
})
SendTwilioSmsController.apxc
/*
* Apex controller that currently contains only one method to send sms message
*/ global class TwilioSendSMSController {
/*
* This method uses the Twilio for Salesforce library class and method to
* send the message using the Twilio api.
*/
@AuraEnabled webService static String sendMessages(String mobNumber, String message, Id contactId) {
System.debug( 'the mobNumber is: ' + mobNumber + ' and the
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Chapter 20 Lightning Actions: Smart, Fast, and Mobile message is: ' + message + ' and contactId is: ' + contactId); if (mobNumber == null) { mobNumber = getPhoneNumber(contactId);
} try {
TwilioRestClient client = TwilioAPI.getDefaultClient();
Map <String,String > params = new Map <String,String > {
'To' => mobNumber,
'From' => '15555551234' ,
'Body' => message
};
TwilioSMS sms = client.getAccount().getSMSMessages().create(params); return sms.getStatus();
} catch(exception ex) {
System.debug( 'oh no, it failed: ' +ex); return 'failed' ;
}
}
@AuraEnabled public static String getPhoneNumber(Id contactId) {
Contact currentRecord = [SELECT Phone FROM Contact WHERE Id
= :contactId]; return currentRecord.Phone.replace( ' ' , '' ).replace( '-' ,
'' ).replace( ')' , '' ).replace( '(' , '' );
}
}
After creating the component, we create a Lightning action. This time we add it to the Contact page layout so agents can access it.
Again, the cool thing is that the action is also available in the Salesforce app. If a car service provider is trying to contact the customer at the airport, the driver can use a mobile device to reach the customer easily.
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Lightning actions are the future of programmatic actions in Lightning Experience. We hope that you start looking at this set of solutions as a better alternative to JavaScript buttons.
And if you depend on partner apps that use JavaScript buttons, you’ll be glad to know that many of our partners have already started migrating and upgrading their apps to Lightning. You can find more apps on the AppExchange that are updated for Lightning Experience.
Beyond the Basics
If you’d like to try Twilio for yourself, you can find an unmanaged package of the Twilio for Salesforce library class used in the third-party integration example in the Salesforce Github library: https://github.com/twilio/twilio-salesforce
Before using Twilio for Salesforce and the Twilio API, create a Twilio account, set up a phone number, and connect your account to Salesforce. See the
TwilioApi.cls
in the Github library for more detailed instructions.
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In this chapter ...
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Identify Stakeholders and an Executive
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CHAPTER 21 Welcome to Your Lightning
Experience Rollout
Welcome! Lightning Experience is a new user experience designed to help your sales reps sell faster and smarter. With the launch of Lightning
Experience, we focused on your sales reps with a re-envisioned desktop experience to support your sales process. The result is a more productive interface designed to support how sales reps work on a daily basis.
Although we started with sales, Lightning Experience doesn’t end there.
Besides transforming Salesforce CRM, Lightning Experience extends to service, apps, platform, and more.
Lightning Experience is available for new and existing Salesforce customers.
Whether you’re a new customer, or you’re an existing customer still evaluating the features and the level of effort to enable Lightning
Experience for users, this module will help you plan your rollout strategy from start to finish. And developing a strategy is important for any project you undertake with Salesforce. Paying close attention to how your users will transition to the new experience will increase adoption and boost success.
Make no mistake, you play a critical role in this process. As a Salesforce administrator, you are more than just a builder of reports, a creator of fields, or a resetter of passwords. You are, in fact, your company’s trusted advisor for Salesforce. And when it comes to Lightning Experience, your company’s rollout strategy starts with you.
So let’s get this show on the road!
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What It Takes to Go Live
Rolling out a project is a lot like putting on a great show. You have to plan it, market it, communicate about it, and execute it. And then the reviews come in. You want rave reviews, which is why you sometimes do previews to work out the kinks before you take your show to the big stage.
As the Salesforce admin, you’re the Director of the show. You make it awesome. For the show we’re organizing right now (“Lightning Experience Rollout: The Musical,” anyone?), you’ll find an executive sponsor and get stakeholders aligned on the value of switching to Lightning Experience, then you’ll plan your rollout. You’ll decide whether to start with a pilot for a set of users (like a preview) or go big and enable for all users at once (head straight to Broadway). And then you’ll put on the show.
Depending on the size of your organization, you might have a Project Manager assigned to the rollout, or you may be working with a Change Management department at your company. Or you could be charged with organizing and executing the rollout from start to finish. Regardless, your role in getting Lightning
Experience live is critical, and it starts with learning everything you can about the new interface.
Let’s begin there.
Educate Yourself About Lightning Experience
Before you start defining your strategy to roll out Lightning Experience, spend some time learning about the ins and outs of the new interface. It’s easy to do that right here. Complete these three Trailhead modules to get details on the new experience:
•
Lightning Experience Basics
•
Lightning Experience Features
•
App Customization Lite
Already got the badges, but want a quick reminder of the top features? Here’s a top features chart for
Lightning Experience.
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Feature
Home
Why It’s Cool
Start the day on the new, intelligent home page. Monitor performance to goal, and get news on key accounts. And stay on track by seeing exactly what needs doing in the Assistant.
Opportunity Workspace Drive the right behaviors at every stage of your sales process from this action-optimized workspace. And reps can work their deals more efficiently using the handy composer to quickly log calls, create tasks, send emails, and more.
Path
Kanban
Guide reps along the steps of a process, such as working an opportunity from a fresh lead to a successfully closed deal. At each step, help your team succeed with step-specific guidance and resources.
Visually review the status of your records for most objects. Drag records from one column to another. For opportunities, get alerts when an action is needed on a key deal.
Accounts and Contacts Find information and see news at a glance from the new layout. Get the latest information about customers with integrated Twitter and news, review upcoming and completed activities, and keep data clean with field-level duplicate matching.
Salesforce Einstein
Activity Timeline and
Task List
Supercharge the productivity of your sales, service, and marketing teams with artificial intelligence. With key predictions, intelligent recommendations, and timely automation, everyone can work smarter and faster.
See open tasks, planned meetings, and accomplishments in the activity timeline on each opportunity, lead, account, and contact.
Or use the task list to see the details of specific tasks alongside the full list of open tasks, tasks due today, and closed tasks. Managers can use the Delegated view to see tasks assigned to people below them in the role hierarchy.
Notes
Integrated Email
Take better notes with auto-save, rich text capabilities, inline images, and versioning. Relate a note to multiple records and share notes with teammates or Chatter groups.
Relate emails to multiple contacts, leads, and users, and to a single opportunity, campaign, case, account, or person account. Send email through Gmail or
Office 365 accounts with your Salesforce email. And see the emails you’ve sent in your Gmail or Office 365 Sent Items folder for seamless integration.
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Feature
Composer Windows
Lightning Dialer
File Preview Player
Live Feeds
Streams
Why It’s Cool
Breeze through those minor but important activities that inevitably crop up during the day without switching context. Quickly log calls, create tasks and events, and jot down notes, all from windows that open on the current page.
Use phone features without ever leaving Salesforce. Make and receive calls, add call notes, and log call information with ease.
Enjoy a richer file preview experience that doesn’t require Adobe Flash Player.
Vector-based preview images render in higher quality and don’t degrade on high-resolution screens, plus they load faster. New controls allow scrolling through multi-page documents, previewing animated GIFs, giving full-screen presentations, and accessing file actions.
See real-time posts in group feeds...and real-time comments in all feeds...without needing to refresh the page. Even see who’s working on a comment while they’re typing.
Combine up to 25 feeds into one super-feed to easily track related information in one place.
Reports and Dashboards Get more from your data. The new report run page is easier to read and filter.
Animated, interactive charts bring your organization’s data to life. And a new dashboard editor supports flexible layouts and components that span columns and rows.
List Views
Favorites
Seamlessly create and edit custom list views to quickly find relevant data. See data faster with more intuitive list views, and search on-the-fly for a specific list view. Visualize data with handy list view charts, or apply filters to slice the data as needed.
Create shortcuts to frequently accessed pages, including records, lists, and groups.
Search
Lightning Apps
Find records faster with improved global search, which includes top results and recent records.
Easily switch between collections of related objects, Visualforce and Lightning pages, and utilities like Lightning Dialer. Customize the branding of each app with logos and color.
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Feature Why It’s Cool
Lightning Console Apps Navigate and work more productively with optimized workflows and a three-column layout. View and edit multiple records at once and quickly access utilities like Lightning Dialer and Open CTI.
Setup Tree and Object
Manager
Navigate setup pages with a simplified organization and a cleaner look and feel. Use the new Object Manager, which combines all standard and custom objects into a single list that is more easily searchable.
Get Hands-On with Lightning Experience
One of the best ways to evaluate how your org’s features and customizations work in Lightning Experience is to get some hands-on experience in the new interface. If you’d like to try out Lightning Experience before you enable it in your production org, you’ve got options.
•
Use the Preview tool that’s available from the Lightning Experience Migration Assistant. Preview lets you explore your production org in Lightning Experience without actually enabling the new interface.
You can see exactly how your real data and your current customizations work. You can even change data, settings, permissions—you name it. But remember that because you’re working in your live org, changes you make are for real and can impact your users back in Salesforce Classic.
•
If you have a sandbox, that’s the ideal place to enable the new interface and play around with settings and customizations in earnest. For steps to enable Lightning Experience, see How to Enable Lightning
Experience .
•
Don’t have a sandbox? Get a free Developer Edition or Admin Playground and enable Lightning
Experience to give it a test drive.
Identify Stakeholders and an Executive Sponsor
It takes a team to roll out any Salesforce project, and there’s no better time to involve your team than right at the beginning. Identify key stakeholders at your company from across all affected departments and form a steering committee, helmed by an executive sponsor who is invested in Salesforce.
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This step is critical. Whether you’ve already committed to rolling out Lightning Experience or you’re still evaluating features, you need executive support to ensure you’ve got resources and alignment to succeed.
In addition, you need the right people from across the company to join your project team, to ensure that every department has their needs met.
As you form your project team, keep in mind that depending on the size of your company, you might have people who fill multiple roles (or “wear multiple hats”).
When you’ve identified an executive sponsor and your stakeholders, involve them in your project early and often, sharing everything you’ve learned about Lightning Experience with them.
With your new project team, and a clear understanding of the benefits you’ll get from Lightning Experience, you’re ready to evaluate your business and technical readiness for Lightning Experience. What are the opportunities to streamline your current business process by harnassing Lightning Experience features?
How well will your org’s features and customizations work as-is in the new interface? How much work is actually required before you can make the switch? Time to find out!
Educate Your Company About Lightning Experience
When you’re finishing assessing the impact of each gap, you’re ready to present your findings to the entire steering committee and your executive sponsor. This meeting is where you showcase all the benefits of
Lightning Experience, and highlight the gaps you’ve found. Come prepared to advise when you think your company should move to Lightning Experience, the amount of time and resources required for the move, and your proposed launch date.
One of the most important questions your executive sponsor and stakeholders will have is, “How will
Lightning Experience help my team sell more?” So start your presentation by showcasing the benefits of
Lightning Experience. To help you share Lightning Experience with your company, get the presentation deck in this enablement pack , which highlights features and benefits.
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If you’re an existing Salesforce customer, explain if any features that are important to your company aren’t available in Lightning Experience today. Your stakeholders can use this information to make an educated decision on when to enable the new interface for your different groups of users.
In addition to sharing the presentation, consider providing a demonstration for your team.
How to Demonstrate Lightning Experience
As your company’s trusted advisor, one of the best ways to educate your company on Lightning Experience is to demo it.
Let’s go over a few best practices:
Make sure what you demo has data Make sure you’ve got sample records for all the features you demo.
Tell your user’s stories when you showcase the app Use your sales team’s real life examples as the stories to drive your demo. For example, consider adding their photos to the user profiles.
Test everything beforehand
Practice makes perfect
Record your demo!
If you’re planning to show any customizations you’ve added, make sure to test them first.
Run through your demo in advance to make sure you’re ready, and to practice the flow of how you’ll demo features.
If you record your demo, you can easily share it with people who couldn’t attend in person. The recording can also be a great training asset later!
Revisit Your Processes
As you and your stakeholders explore the features and benefits of Lightning Experience, there will likely be questions that sound like this: “That’s cool, but can it do this thing we do today? What about that other thing we do—can it do that?”
It’s natural to be thinking about how you can take your existing business process and make it work in the new user experience. But sometimes revisiting a process and improving it is a better next step. In other words, maybe “the way we’ve always done it” isn’t the best path forward. More than just a new interface,
Lightning Experience re-imagines how you manage your business. As trusted advisor, you can help your
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Chapter 21 Welcome to Your Lightning Experience Rollout users see that updating their process to adopt new features and paradigms in Lightning Experience can actually make them more productive.
And if you’ve been a Salesforce customer for a long time, no doubt your business has evolved and changed.
This is a great opportunity to re-evaluate what your users need and align your Lightning Experience implementation with those needs.
So how do you do that? It’s easier said than done, but here are some ideas:
•
Ask directly, “Can we change the way we do it?” The value proposition of new, improved functionality might be worth updating an existing process.
•
Walk key members of your sales teams and super users through Lightning Experience features, showing them how easy they are, how they work, and why they’re helpful.
•
Above all, work with your executive sponsor to drive the right behaviors from the top down.
Perform a Gap Analysis
Performing a gap analysis is where you get into the nitty gritty details of how your current Salesforce implementation will work when you move to Lightning Experience. Of all the steps for your rollout, this one is probably the most critical because it'll help you know what changes or workarounds you might need to put in place. You may even be delighted to learn that you’re ready for Lightning Experience now!
Luckily, we have the perfect tool to make light work of this analysis. Meet the Lightning Experience Readiness
Check!
Access the Readiness Check from the Lightning Experience Migration Assistant. From Setup in Salesforce
Classic, click Get Started in the Migration Assistant tile at the top of the menu (1). On the Check Readiness tab in the Migration Assistant (2), click Check Readiness (3).
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After you kick off the Readiness Check, Salesforce generates a PDF Readiness Report and emails it to you.
Salesforce also saves the report to Salesforce Files.
Review your personalized Readiness Report for advice and recommendations about how to get ready for
Lightning Experience. Use the findings in your report to identify the work that should happen before you launch a pilot, updates that can happen in a later phase of your rollout, and the users who are good candidates for your pilot group.
Curious what exactly is covered in the report? Check out What Does the Lightning Experience Readiness
Check Evaluate?
in the Salesforce Help.
If you like, you can set up a free 30-minute consultation with a Lightning expert to review your report and ask questions about your next steps.
The Readiness Check doesn’t analyze all Salesforce features and customizations. To help you evaluate things not covered by the Readiness Check, we’ve included a sample gap analysis checklist in the enablement pack . It highlights many of the areas you should investigate when conducting your gap analysis.
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Assess the Impact
After you conduct your gap analysis, assess the impact. This is one of those areas where it pays to have a team! Work with your stakeholders to identify the severity of each gap. You can use several methodologies when assessing impact, including assigning a numeric value to each gap, or plotting the gaps on a simple chart.
For example, you could use a risk severity matrix like this one to categorize any gaps you’ve found in your analysis. (There’s a sample in the enablement pack .) If you’re not using Territory Management and have limited use of Entitlements, those would plot low. Conversely, if you have several JavaScript buttons and your org makes heavy use of Work.com features, those would plot high.
When the Show Is a Go
When you get the green light to proceed, get started on the next steps right away. Executing on a project is as much about preparing your users for the new experience as it is about the technical steps to implement.
In the next unit, we’ll help you craft a rollout strategy and then execute it in style. It’s time to go live with greatness!
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In this chapter ...
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Unleash the Power of Super Users
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Create a Marketing and Communication
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Planning and executing your Lightning Experience project should involve process, discipline, and yes, a sense of fun! What’s the point of introducing game-changing new features if your users aren’t excited about the rollout?
In this unit, we’ll talk about how to schedule and plan your rollout effectively, but we’ll also share ideas for turning your launch into an awesome event at your company.
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Where to Start
Remember our Broadway musical analogy? You’re the Director, and your show just got greenlighted. So now what? Now it’s time to get busy.
Start by listing everything you need to do before you go live, and then estimate the time and resources needed for those activities. Then select a launch date, get your team, and go do all of it. Doesn’t that sound easy?
Doing all of that takes time and coordination. There are a number of methodologies for project management, too many for us to cover here. Each one has different strategies for delivering projects. Pick whichever method you like. Ultimately, the important part isn’t the way you do it; it’s what you do. That’s what we’ll talk about here.
Plan Your Rollout
There are several tasks to consider when rolling out Lightning Experience. Depending on your company, you don’t have to do all of them, but consider them regardless. Check the enablement pack for a sample
Lightning Experience rollout checklist.
Your rollout will likely be organized into these main phases. You already learned about the “Discover” steps in the last unit. In this chapter, we’ll look at the “Roll Out” phase.
Let’s dive in.
Decide How to Structure Your Rollout
There isn’t a single right way to roll out Lightning Experience. There are several variables to consider when deciding on a strategy—like the complexity of your implementation and the size of your Salesforce user
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Chapter 22 All Systems Go base. But in most cases, you’ll take one of these approaches: transition your org gradually in phases or go all-in, switching your entire org at the same time.
To pick the best strategy for your org, let's look at the benefits and considerations for both approaches.
Phased Rollout
Unless your org is small, it can be advantageous to transition your users to Lightning Experience over the course of several phases. This approach allows you to tackle your business and technical requirements incrementally, and iterate on lessons learned. For each phase, pick teams or groups of users whose business needs are met by the current state of your Lightning Experience implementation. After launching a phase, collect feedback. Then fine-tune things and kick off the next phase.
Note:
If you're using Group Edition, this approach isn't an option for you. Lightning Experience is
"all or nothing"—all users get access when Lightning Experience is enabled.
Run a pilot to learn about, and refine, your implementation
Benefits
Ensure that users are productive and enthusiastic about adopting Lightning Experience by starting small with a pilot program. Using the first phase to conduct user acceptance testing allows you to gather feedback from pilot users and solidify your implementation before going all-in with the next phase.
Break up the work and avoid technical debt For each phase, focus your configuration and development efforts on just what’s necessary to make the users in that phase productive. Chunking up the work allows you to make continual progress on your implementation and avoid the pitfalls of falling behind on new features and enhancements as they’re released.
Get fine-grained control over which users get access to Lightning Experience
Use permission sets for a flexible way to roll out
Lightning Experience to a particular team or group of users. Rather than updating your custom profiles, create a permission set that includes the Lightning
Experience User permission, then assign the permission set to the users you’ve identified for each phase.
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Keep teams together
Considerations
Put people who work closely together in the same phase. You want people who work together seeing the same screens. If people collaborate often, they should have the same user experience, including team leaders.
If you have standard profile users who shouldn’t get access to Lightning Experience in earlier phases, plan to move them to custom profiles that don’t include the Lightning Experience User permission.
Be mindful of gaps
More training and other change management is required
If you have teams that are heavily impacted by issues that you identified in your gap analysis, avoid including those teams in a phase until the issues are addressed. Even if the number of gaps is small, if the impact is large, consider carefully if they’ll be productive working in Lightning Experience.
You’ll need to invest more time in change management activities. For example, you’ll need to repeat communication and drip campaigns for each phase. And depending on how far apart you launch each phase, you may also need to run user trainings multiple times.
If your user base is split across Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic, you may need to maintain training materials for both interfaces. Though you can avoid this by enabling all new users for
Lightning Experience and eliminating their ability to switch to Salesforce Classic.
Org-Wide Rollout
With this approach, you enable Lightning Experience for all users in your org at the same time. On the surface, this may seem like the easiest, most straightforward way to structure your rollout. If your org configuration is simple and you don’t have many Salesforce users, this method may make the most sense for you. But it also requires that you’re highly confident that everyone gets what they need in the new
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Chapter 22 All Systems Go interface and that everyone is prepared for the transition. And obviously, the need for advanced preparation has implications for how long it will take to get ready to flip the switch.
Simpler training and change management landscape
Simplified feature and program enablement You don’t need to evaluate new features, customization work, integrations, or partner applications for multiple interfaces. All your users get the benefits of new features and technology as they’re released.
Considerations
Delays time to launch
Benefits
With all your users moving to Lightning Experience at the same time, you can run a single campaign to get everyone on board. And you only need to maintain training materials for one interface.
Less feedback increases the chance of missing something important
Watch out for technical debt
Getting Lightning Experience ready for everyone in your org means you're front-loading all the preparation work, including implementing all required business processes and addressing all technical issues and feature gaps that you identified.
In other words, it can be quite time consuming to get ready for this approach.
Waiting to go all-in with everyone means that you don’t get the advantage of early feedback on how things are working. If you inadvertently miss an important use case or customization, everyone is impacted instead of a smaller subset of users. If users don’t get what they need out of the gate, they lose their enthusiasm. Ultimately, adoption rates could suffer.
We’re continually improving and enhancing
Lightning Experience. The longer it takes to move your org over, the more features and opportunities for improved productivity you’ll get behind on.
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Decide Which Users Get Lightning Experience
If you're taking a phased approach to your rollout, there are things to consider when deciding who moves to Lightning Experience in each phase. And for each phase, you have options to control who is immediately switched to the new interface and who can and can’t switch between Lightning Experience and Salesforce
Classic. Get all the details from
Set Up Users for Lightning Experience on page 37.
Whether you’re deciding on the project schedule for a phased rollout or an org-wide rollout, picking your launch date is influenced by the users involved and what they’ll get from Lightning Experience when they’re enabled. You may be inclined to hold off on launching to your users until everything is fully implemented. Or maybe you're fretting about grumpy users—you know, users who have a lot going on and no time to learn a new way of working. These are legitimate considerations but they shouldn't be a reason to delay getting started. Saying hello to Lightning Experience doesn't mean saying goodbye to
Salesforce Classic! Unless you set it up otherwise, your users can switch themselves between both interfaces as needed. So they can easily pop back to Salesforce Classic if something they need isn't available yet in
Lightning Experience.
Unleash the Power of Super Users
Super users are employees who understand the vision and value of your implementation, want to help you optimize and improve what’s in place, and are passionate about helping others adopt Salesforce.
Often closely engaged with your employee community, super users know how well systems and processes are being adopted, and which pain points are preventing adoption. Super users are also the first people your employees go to for help, and they can be incredible in helping you answer questions and provide support.
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Super users are often natural leaders, well-respected by their peers, and can be your evangelists in the field. And when it comes to rolling out Lightning Experience, they can help make your project a success.
Work with your Executive Sponsor and stakeholders to identify a group of super users. Involve your super users in the rollout by giving them sneak peeks at Lightning Experience and early opportunities to train on the new technology. Seek their feedback on your marketing and communication plans, and consider asking them to train users, with a train-the-trainer approach.
Officially recognize their super user status through a special designation, like a custom icon on their Chatter profile photo, a button, a t-shirt—or all three! Make them moderators or managers of public Chatter groups for Lightning Experience. All of this helps validate their role as leaders in your employee community and empowers them to help others.
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Create a Chatter Group for the Rollout Team
After you identify your super users, stakeholders, and executive sponsor, you need a place where you can all work together on the rollout. Create a Chatter group and invite in all of your team members involved with the rollout. Using Chatter, you can share files, collaborate in context, and share relevant updates with the whole team.
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One of the key files to share in your Chatter group is a project schedule. The project schedule is a living document that you’ll want to keep updated and make accessible to your whole team, so it’s ideal to store it in the cloud in your team’s Chatter group.
Pick a Launch Date
Pick your launch date wisely! Think about aligning your launch to coincide with your company’s sales kickoff meeting or another large company event where you can get organic exposure for your rollout.
Avoid holidays and confirm stakeholder availability in advance. If a key stakeholder is on vacation for three weeks leading up to your launch date, consider revisiting your selected date!
Could Be Good Timing
Sales kickoff
Company meeting
Low season (if applicable)
Not So Much
Holidays
End of quarter/fiscal year
When key stakeholders are on vacation
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Take this opportunity to review your existing Salesforce roadmap and clear any projects that might compete with your rollout. Work with your executive sponsor to clear any roadblocks, such as competing non-Salesforce projects that require resources you need for your rollout. If your rollout looks complex, you may need to advise your company to put other projects on hold until this project is complete.
Create a Project Schedule
There are apps on the AppExchange or software programs designed to help you manage all the milestones and tasks associated with your project. You may already have a favorite program or app that you like to use. Ultimately, you need a place to track these details:
•
Task name
•
Task owner
•
Task dependencies (does the task depend on any other task or resource?)
•
Task duration
•
Task start date
•
Task end date
•
Task status
You might also want a place to add notes or comments.
Rolling out Lightning Experience could take you anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months.
The time it takes can depend on several factors, including the complexity of your organization, the size of your user population, your company’s approach to change management, or if you’re a new customer implementing Salesforce.
In any project, you need to be flexible either on the go-live date, the scope, or the resources allocated.
Here’s the first part of a sample project schedule with a fixed go-live date and scope, for a company with a straightforward migration path and a small group of users.
Check out the enablement pack for the full sample schedule. In this example, the time to go live is one month from the start date, with a launch date of October 15. There are two weeks of post-launch activities following the launch before the project officially closes, at which point you move into maintaining and iterating on the solution provided.
# Status Dependencies Duration Start End
1.0
Task name
Educate yourself
Owner
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#
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
Task name
Complete
Trailhead modules
Owner
John
Sign up for
Developer
Edition organization
John
Read the
Lightning
Experience
Guide
John
Review comparison charts
John
Status
Complete
Complete
Complete
Complete
Dependencies
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
Duration
1 day
1 day
2 days
1 days
Start
9/5
9/5
9/6
9/6
9/6
9/8
9/7
End
9/6
One of the key items in phase three of the schedule is to identify measures for success. This is how you’ll ultimately know if your project was successful, based on the criteria you define for what success looks like.
Let’s talk about that next.
Define Measures for Success
Work with your executive sponsor and stakeholders to determine how you want to measure success.
Document current pain points and look for ways to measure improvements in these areas. For example, you could look for productivity gains, data quality gains, or financial goals, such as:
•
20% reduction in opportunities with no follow-up tasks
•
15% increase in calls logged
•
5% increase in lead conversion rate
You could also measure success based on employee or customer sentiment, using a survey app from the
AppExchange to collect feedback, or simple Chatter polls to survey employees quickly.
In each instance, conduct a baseline survey or take an analytic snapshot to measure any increase or decrease following your go-live.
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We’ll discuss methods for measuring success in the next unit. At this stage, work with your project team to outline the specific measures you want to monitor.
4 weeks prior
4 weeks prior
3 weeks prior
3 weeks prior
2 weeks prior
2 weeks prior
1 week prior
1 week prior
1 day prior
Create a Marketing and Communication Strategy
This is the part of the rollout where you can inject some fun into the project, and where you can go live with greatness. Consider making your go-live into a true event and use simple marketing strategies to build buzz and excitement about the coming launch for weeks in advance.
No matter your budget, you can use your creativity to market your go-live. Don’t forget to ask for help from internal teams, including customer care, training, and support teams. Launch ideas include:
•
Send a weekly email drip campaign highlighting the coming launch and a “feature of the week”
( enablement pack ).
•
Create a topic in Chatter for all your communication updates to drive momentum and buzz.
•
Have a raffle with prizes, such as gift cards, a free day off, or lunch with an executive.
•
Host a launch party with cupcakes or cake.
•
Order swag and branded items to distribute on the day of your go-live.
Include key communication milestones in your marketing strategy. For example, make sure that the entire company gets an official communication on the day of the launch, as a Chatter post or email from your executive sponsor, VP of Sales, or CEO.
Here’s a sample communication plan:
Email from executive sponsor
Chatter group created
Email drip campaign #1
Super users identified and announced
Email drip campaign #2
Raffle announced
Email drip campaign #3
Email from company President
Email with reminders, instructions, and where to get help
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Day of Go-Live Chatter post from company CEO and launch party
Create a Training Plan
As part of your rollout, prepare your users for the changes in their user experience.
First, direct your users to Trailhead! To help get your users up to speed, we’ve put together two learning experiences for them to use.
•
Salesforce User Tour
•
Sell Lightning Fast with Salesforce
Depending on how customized your user interface is or how complex your processes are, you may also want to conduct end user training.
When you’re developing your training plan, consider these questions:
Training goals
Trainer
Trainees
Training methods
Training location
Training metrics
What is the specific outcome you want to achieve with this training?
Who will conduct the training?
Who needs to be trained?
What will you use to conduct the training? What materials need to be developed?
Will you train remotely or in-person?
How will you determine if the training was successful?
Consider using a train-the-trainer model with your super users to help you extend your reach. Rather than training all of your users personally, you can train your super users and have them conduct user training.
This train-the-trainer model also helps reinforce to users that they should go to the super users with any questions post-launch.
Also consider follow-up training sessions or office hours after your launch to help reinforce the right behaviors and keep your users current. If you have a support team, involve them in the training too, so they can be prepared for user questions.
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Test Your Customizations and Iterate
For existing customers, if you already have customizations in place, we recommend enabling Lightning
Experience in a sandbox and testing their behavior. For unsupported features, like JavaScript buttons, analyze what the underlying function is of each. Here’s a set of questions you can use in your analysis:
•
What does the customized feature do?
•
What objects are affected or accessed?
•
What are the resulting actions of using the customized feature?
•
What is the user experience?
•
Where can your user access the customized feature?
After you have the answers to these questions, you can start to map the customized feature to a possible replacement. For example:
If the customized feature does this:
Creates a related record
Updates an existing record
Creates related records and updates existing records, with complex logic
Launches a screen for user input
Sends an email or creates a task
Launches a time-triggered process
Consider using this instead:
Process Builder
Actions
Process Builder and Visual Workflow
Visual Workflow
Process Builder
Workflow Rules
As you work through updating these processes, work closely with your super users and users to test the replacement solutions you build. Create test plans and conduct User Acceptance Testing (UAT) to ensure features work as expected. Get a sample test plan document in the enablement pack .
Ready to Start
After you’ve created these plans, work with your project team, stakeholders, executive sponsor, and super users to execute them. And once you’ve checked all the items off your list, it’s time to go live! In the next unit, you’ll enable Lightning Experience and find out how you can boost your success post-launch.
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In this chapter ...
•
•
•
•
•
•
There comes a time in every successful project where you’ve planned everything, executed on all those plans, and then the launch date arrives.
This means it’s time to go big and go live with greatness. If this is your
Broadway musical, then it’s opening night, and Salesforce admin, this is your time to shine!
Depending on the project, the go-live step can be simple, complex, or somewhere in between. We make it easier with the Lightning Experience
Migration Assistant, where you can access all the steps that need to be completed to move to Lightning Experience. Access this page from Setup in Salesforce Classic, by clicking Get Started in the Migration Assistant tile.
The Migration Assistant is your guide to enabling Lightning Experience.
Keep in mind there are other features that we recommend you enable before turning on Lightning Experience. Key features are covered by the
Migration Assistant. You can also review Recommended Features for
on page 36 in the Salesforce Help for more details.
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Engage with Super Users
Your super users are key to the success of your rollout. Leading up to your go-live, engage with your super users often. Depending on your training approach, you might be partnering with them as they lead user training in the field.
On the day of your go-live, super users play an essential role. Even with the most successful projects, your users are going to have questions. Those questions can come in the form of in-person conversations or questions asked on Chatter. Your super users can help you swarm on those questions, and escalate any bugs or critical issues that are discovered.
But your engagement with super users doesn’t end with your go-live. That’s just the beginning. Consider setting up a monthly or quarterly super user forum meeting where you gather all your super users together and talk about the roadmap, feedback, and overall adoption. Create a private Chatter group with your super users to facilitate conversation year-round. And work with your super users to host weekly office hours to answer user questions.
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If you’re not yet convinced, here’s a short list of some of the ways these incredible team members put the
“super” in super user:
•
Play the role of Salesforce evangelist in the field
•
Swarm on questions from users, in-person and on Chatter
•
Help you boost adoption
•
Train users
•
Share valuable insight from the field
•
Report bugs and issues
•
Weigh in on the roadmap
•
Test new features before they go live
•
Provide feedback in forums, meetings, and focus groups
As you’ll see, super users provide tremendous value, especially when it comes to sharing feedback, which is critical for measuring the success of your project. Let’s talk about that next.
Measure Results
When you were planning your rollout strategy, you worked with your executive sponsor and stakeholders to determine your success metrics. Those metrics might have included things like:
•
20% reduction in opportunities with no follow-up tasks
•
15% increase in calls logged
•
5% increase in lead conversion
Or, the metrics might have been based on employee or customer satisfaction, or even a mixture of both.
For either approach, you need a baseline to work from to track changes in the numbers, so don’t forget to take a snapshot or conduct a survey before you go live.
Let’s discuss each approach in detail.
Survey Your Users
You can use several methods to survey your employees and customers.
Survey Use a survey app to conduct a formal written survey, measuring overall satisfaction and any pain points.
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Focus Groups
Poll
Bring together a group of customers or employees and ask a set of specific questions.
Create an informal Chatter poll to gather quick insights. Users can also provide written feedback in the poll’s comment thread.
Using these methods, you can obtain metrics about overall satisfaction and any pain points. Following your go-live, after users are comfortably working with the new experience, you can survey again and report on any changes in the metrics.
Not sure what to ask? Here are some ideas. We’re including questions that are open-ended and appropriate for focus groups, forums, and shadowing, and also questions more appropriate for a written survey:
Open-ended questions Survey questions
How do you use Salesforce?
What do you like best about Salesforce?
How long have you been using Salesforce?
Rate your overall productivity using Salesforce.
What would you change about Salesforce?
What is most frustrating about Salesforce?
Rate your overall satisfaction with Salesforce.
I have the tools I need to do my job: Yes or No.
What information do you need that you can’t find?
It’s easy to work in Salesforce: Yes or No.
In addition to conducting surveys, cultivate an environment where feedback can flourish. Listening to your users boosts adoption. Here are some ideas for how to encourage your users to give regular feedback.
Open Forum
Chatter
Host an open question and answer session, online via Chatter or in-person, to get feedback and hear concerns.
Use a Chatter Topic (“feedback”) to collect responses from your users organically over time. Review all the posts monthly or quarterly.
When you’re receiving feedback, it’s important that your users feel heard, even though you can’t address all feedback. Consider starting a “You Asked, We Listened” program where you address some employee feedback items every quarter.
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Whether you’re doing a limited pilot or rolling out to your whole company at once, the goal is to go live, measure your results, and then iterate. Then repeat.
Use Reports and Dashboards in Salesforce
If you’ve decided to use Salesforce metrics for your success measures, then you can create reports and dashboards within Salesforce to track those metrics. For example, this dashboard component shows closed deals, month over month:
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Reporting Snapshots are a way to analyze trends over time, right in Salesforce. Search for “Reporting
Snapshots” in the Salesforce Help to learn more.
One of the benefits of using reports and dashboards is that they’re all built within Salesforce, which makes it easy to share with your executive sponsor. Speaking of which…
Deliver an Executive Summary
Your Executive Sponsor has been your project champion from the start. Now it’s time to prepare a summary for your sponsor on the overall project status and any results you’re able to share. This is important for your
Executive Sponsor to be able to showcase Return on Investment (ROI) for the resources that were allocated to complete the project.
When you’re preparing an executive summary, follow these best practices:
•
Keep it to 1-2 pages maximum.
•
Showcase metrics and results.
•
Highlight any noteworthy anecdotes.
•
Share lessons learned.
•
Note any next steps still planned.
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Looking for a sample Executive Summary document? Sorry, we didn’t make one. Just kidding! Check the enablement pack .
The Show Must Go On
Congratulations! You now have the tools you need to roll out Lightning Experience. Hopefully, you’ve also picked up some tips along the way to help you with other rollouts beyond Lightning Experience.
Whether you’re piloting with a group of users or rolling out to your entire company at once, this is your chance to go big. Good luck with your rollout!
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CHAPTER 24 User Interface Development
Considerations
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Lightning Experience is a brand new, amazing opportunity for developers on the Force.com platform. In this module we’re going to look at many of the aspects that make Lightning Experience different for developers. Before we get to that, though, we want to have a quick chat about a couple higher-level concerns.
Let’s start with something we want to be completely honest with you about: Lightning Experience isn’t finished yet. If you’ve visited some of the other Lightning Experience Trailhead modules, you already know there is plenty of work for us to do just building out the basic Salesforce application.
On the Force.com side of things, we have plenty to do as well. Most things are working great, but there are still some things we haven’t gotten to yet.
About this we want you to know two things: First, we’re very hard at work turning Lightning Experience into a complete development platform for your apps. And—Safe Harbor, yadda yadda yadda—you’ll be getting important missing features in the next release, and the next, and so on.
Second, we very much want your feedback. Tell us what’s working great to make us feel good, and tell us about what’s not, to keep us working hard, to shape priorities, and to help us make sure Lightning Experience becomes the best cloud-based development platform you can imagine.
Finally, we want to answer some really important questions that you’re asking us about where you should put your efforts as you grow your existing apps and build new ones. Put simply, what’s the future of user interface development and custom apps on the Force.com Platform?
We’re glad you asked! We’re so excited about the answer, we’re going to take the rest of this unit to go beyond just answering the question, and try to give you insights into our thinking.
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Raising the Bar for Web App User Interfaces
Over the last decade or more, we’ve all seen the bar continually be raised for user experience in web applications. Users expect responsive, fully featured, and highly interactive, immersive experiences literally at their fingertips.
We first saw this in single-purpose apps. Services like Google Maps introduced direct manipulation of user interface elements. Analytics applications brought dynamic, interactive chart drill-downs. Even the humble sign-up or log in form comes with dynamic error feedback when users enter invalid data, animations, transitions, and more. Interactivity is no longer a novelty, it’s the norm.
And the scale has grown. The expectation for individual components has quickly spread to the core application experience. Today web applications feature things like sliding menus, animated page transitions, and dynamic master-details. There’s also app-style elements such as overlays and modal windows. The difference between native applications and web applications has never been smaller.
So what does this mean for Salesforce?
The traditional Salesforce experience, lovingly known as Salesforce Classic, is an example of a page-centric web application model. It’s great for basic functionality, but it’s challenging to deliver the new, more dynamic experience that users expect. Fundamentally, this is because it relies on the server to generate a new page every time you interact with the application.
To deliver a more interactive experience, you need help from JavaScript on the client-side. In this new
app-centric model, JavaScript is used to create, modify, transform, and animate the user interface rather
than completely replacing it a page at a time. This model is exciting, interactive, and fluid. This is the new
Lightning Experience.
Both the page-centric and app-centric models are here to stay. A quick look around the web is enough to show that most web applications take advantage of both approaches. Combining these models lets applications deliver the right type of experience for the right use case.
Let’s take some time to explore the different options that the Salesforce Platform offers for these models.
Classic Visualforce
Visualforce is a robust, mature platform for building page-centric apps. The Visualforce framework provides a robust set of tags that are resolved on the server, and that work alongside standard or custom controllers to make database and other operations simple to implement.
Let’s review some basics.
UI Generation
Server-side
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Data and Business Logic
Apex standard or custom controller
Workflow
1. User requests a page
2. The server executes the page’s underlying code and sends the resulting HTML to the browser
3. The browser displays the HTML
4. When the user interacts with the page, return to step one
Pros
•
Tried and true model
•
Easy to implement for greater productivity
•
Naturally splits large applications into small, manageable pages
•
Has built-in metadata integration
Caveats
•
Limited interactivity (aside from added JavaScript functionality)
•
Higher latency, which degrades mobile performance
Visualforce is conceptually similar to other page-centric technologies like PHP, ASP, JSP, and Ruby on Rails.
Salesforce’s rich metadata infrastructure makes Visualforce a productive solution. The standard controller makes it easy to access objects directly and via relationships without executing a single query. Other metadata-aware components are similarly plug-and-play: add markup to a page and you’re done. These capabilities are alive and well on the platform, and they’re still suitable for many use cases.
Visualforce as a JavaScript Application Container
When you think about it, Visualforce pages are just HTML pages with extra tags resolved by the server. As a result, you can use an empty Visualforce page as a container for a JavaScript application. In this scenario, you don’t use Visualforce tags to build your user interface. Instead, you load your JavaScript application in an empty page. Then the user interface is generated on the client-side by the JavaScript application. These applications are generally referred to as single-page applications, or SPAs, and are often built using third-party frameworks like AngularJS or React.
Let’s review some basics.
UI Generation
Client-side (mostly JavaScript)
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Data and Business Logic
Remote Objects or JavaScript Remoting, Apex controller
Workflow
1. The user requests the “empty” Visualforce page containing a page skeleton and JavaScript includes
2. The page is returned to the browser
3. The browser loads the JavaScript application
4. The JavaScript application generates the UI
5. When a user interacts with the application, the JavaScript modifies the user interface as needed
(return to the previous step)
Pros
•
Enables highly interactive and immersive user experiences
Caveats
•
Complex
•
No built-in metadata integration
•
Lack of an integrated developer experience. The Force.com Developer Console doesn’t explicitly support these JavaScript applications. Typically, you have to load them as static resources, and that’s a cumbersome experience.
We want to be clear. If you can live with the caveats we’ve described, this is a perfectly good way to build interactive applications today. It’s the reason we originally built toolkits like Remote Objects and JavaScript remoting. If you’re a confident AngularJS or React or other JavaScript framework developer, your expertise will take you a long way developing apps for Salesforce with the tools you know.
But, if you’re open to new things, we think we have some great ideas for what the next level is in web-based application development.
Lightning Components
Lightning components are part of the new Salesforce user interface framework for developing dynamic web applications for desktop and mobile devices. They use JavaScript at the client-side and Apex at the server-side to provide the data and business logic.
Let’s take a look at an overview.
UI Generation
Client-side (JavaScript)
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Data and Business Logic
Lightning Data Services, Apex controller
Workflow
1. The user requests an application or a component
2. The application or component bundle is returned to the client
3. The browser loads the bundle
4. The JavaScript application generates the UI
5. When the user interacts with the page, the JavaScript application modifies the user interface as
needed (return to previous step)
Pros
•
Enables highly interactive and immersive user experiences
•
Aligns with Salesforce user interface strategy
•
Built on metadata from the foundation, accelerating development
•
Both the Force.com IDE and the Developer Console support Lightning components, providing an integrated developer experience
Caveats
•
Steeper, longer learning curve compared to Visualforce
•
Higher complexity than Visualforce—you’re building an application, not a page
•
Since Lightning components are new, there are still some features that aren’t supported
•
There are a limited number of out-of-the-box components
We need to be straight with you. These caveats aren’t small considerations. We’ll talk about how they apply to your organization in a bit. But! We’re working hard—really hard—on reducing the size of these considerations. We’re super-excited to bring improvements to you, as soon as we can.
Choosing the Right Tool for the Job
Visualforce has been around for a while, it’s a mature, well-understood platform for building your apps.
It’s not going away. Lightning Components is the new kid on the block. It’s got a lot going for it, but, well, you know. It’s a stranger to you right now.
Here’s the thing: You don’t have to choose one or the other.
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Think of the page-centric and app-centric models as tools in your development tool belt—one isn’t always better than the other, and you’ll get the most out of them if you understand their strengths and their trade-offs. Use the right tool for the job at hand.
Here are some guidelines to help you decide—but remember, you’re The Decider. In the end, use the tool that feels right to you. Also, keep in mind that tools evolve. These guidelines will evolve too.
Job Recommendation
I’m Developing for Lightning Experience
We highly recommend Lightning Components. Lightning
Experience was built with Lightning Components, and the two fit together like hand and glove.
You can certainly use Visualforce if you have existing code or a project underway. Visualforce for Lightning Experience is fully supported, with a few constraints.
But you won’t find a better tool for Lightning Experience than working in its native language, Lightning Components.
I’m Developing for the Salesforce Mobile
Application
We recommend Lightning Components. Visualforce characteristics, especially the page-centric orientation, can be a poor match for mobile apps with limited, high-latency network connections and limited compute resources.
Lightning Components, by contrast, was designed
specifically to handle this context.
Both Visualforce and Lightning Components use similar tag-based markup. For example, Visualforce markup for an input field is
<apex:inputText>
while for Lightning
Components it’s
<lightning:input>
.
So what’s the difference? Well, Visualforce processes markup tags on the Salesforce server. Lightning
Components process markup on the client. The advantage of processing on the client is that the HTML block for the entire page isn’t passed back and forth between the client and the server with every interaction.
With a few exceptions, Lightning Components are better for Salesforce mobile development. Some cases call for
Visualforce as a JavaScript application. See the Lightning
Components Developer’s Guide for more information.
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Job Recommendation
I’m Building a Page-Centric Experience with Limited Client-Side Logic
Use Visualforce pages to ensure development velocity and manageability.
I’m Building an Interactive Experience with JavaScript to Meet User Experience
Requirements
Use Lightning Components but refer to limitations documentation first.
I’m Committed to a JavaScript
Framework Such as AngularJS or React
Use a Visualforce page as a container for your third-party framework, such as AngularJS or React, and your application.
I’m Enabling Non-Developers to Build
Apps by Assembling Standard or
Custom Components
Use Lightning Components to create custom components that can be used in the Lightning App Builder.
I’m Building an Interactive Experience with JavaScript and I Need a Third-Party
Framework
Use a Visualforce page as a container for your third-party framework, such as AngularJS or React, and your application.
I’m Adding User Interface Elements
For example, say you want to add a tab to a record home.
This task is a simple drag-and-drop in the Lightning App
Builder. Use Lightning Components to create custom user interface elements.
I’m Building a Community for Customers
Use Community Builder to create a Lightning-based community leveraging Lightning Components.
I’m Building a Community for Partners
Use Community Builder to create a Lightning-based community leveraging Lightning Components.
I’m Exposing a Public-Facing
Unauthenticated Website
I’m Rendering Pages as PDFs in My
Application
I’m Adding to an Existing Project with
Lots of Visualforce Pages
Use Community Builder to create a Lightning-based site leveraging Lightning Components.
Use Visualforce. Lightning Components don’t support rendering as PDF output yet.
Continue to use Visualforce. Consider opportunistically moving elements to Lightning Components using
Lightning Components for Visualforce.
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Job Recommendation
I’m Committed to Investing in the Latest
Technology
You’re right there with us! Dive in to Lightning Components.
Start with the Lightning Components Basics Trailhead module.
I’m Starting a Brand New Project
Use Lightning Components. If you’re not familiar with them, there’s no better time than now to learn!
Choosing the Right Tool for Your Organization
When you think about choosing a tool, it’s important to focus on more than just the job at hand. You also want to consider your organization as a whole and your role within your organization. Let’s look at how some different roles can best leverage Salesforce’s development models.
Role
ISV Partner
Recommendation
Start using Lightning components for new apps or new features in existing apps. Package these units for subscriber use in both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience.
SI Start using Lightning components for new implementations. For in-progress implementations, continue using Visualforce.
Professional developers who are JavaScript gurus and experienced with Visualforce
Continue using Visualforce with your preferred JavaScript framework. Explore Lightning components and consider switching down the line.
Citizen developers who use standard
Visualforce components for pages
Point-and-click admins
Continue using Visualforce, but consider checking out the
Lightning App Builder.
Use the Lightning App Builder to create apps and customizations. Buddy up with developers and partners to build custom Lightning components.
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Migrating to Lightning Components
Here’s the good news. Despite the shift to Lightning Experience and an increased focus on Lightning components, your Visualforce pages still work on Salesforce. It doesn’t matter if you’re using the new interface or your old friend Salesforce Classic—Visualforce is able to work with both. You don’t have to convert any existing Visualforce pages to keep using them for a long time.
But, because web applications are taking more advantage of the app-centric model, we encourage all
Salesforce developers to learn at least the basics of Lightning components. You’ll want to use these components in your future development work.
Now is the perfect time for you to take the first steps. Features such as the Lightning App Builder and
Lightning Components for Visualforce let you “dip your toe in the water,” and try using as little as a single
Lightning component in a new or existing page. You can use these embedded components in both
Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic. It’s so easy, you’d be nuts not to give it a try.
We know that migrating to a new development framework is daunting. But we’re here for you. This trail is loaded with all the tips, tricks, and gotchas that you need to successfully adopt Lightning Experience development.
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CHAPTER 25 Visualforce and Lightning Experience
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
•
Lightning Experience is a whole new world, and we hope you think it’s exciting. Behind the Lightning Experience user interface is a new way of delivering the Salesforce application, one that brings significant changes to the way Visualforce apps run. For the most part, your Visualforce apps should “just work,” but there are some things you should know before you make the jump to Lightning Experience.
The technical details of how Lightning Experience is built and how it runs
Visualforce apps are really cool, and important for actual development work. When you’re ready for those details, the Visualforce & Lightning
Experience module will show you the way. But here we’re going to stay at a high level, and divide things up into what works and what doesn’t, what you’ll want to update, and other issues that will help you plan your
Lightning Experience migration development effort.
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What Works
The list of what parts of Visualforce work in Lightning Experience is pretty long. It’s very nearly as long as the entire Visualforce features list. So before we get to the things that aren’t on the list, let’s think positive, and check off some of the many things you can count on.
First of all, the fundamental mechanisms of how Visualforce works remain the same. Whether your pages use the standard controller, custom controllers, JavaScript remoting, or Remote Objects, your connection to Salesforce works the same.
Note: If you’re using JavaScript extensively, or if you’re using other APIs to access Salesforce, you might have some work to do. We’ll get to that.
Second, Visualforce markup remains the same. There are a few tags and attributes that behave differently in Lightning Experience, and a very few that we recommend against using or that just don’t work. But otherwise the way you write code for Visualforce pages and components is unchanged.
Third, most of the ways you can use Visualforce to customize your organization work just fine in Lightning
Experience—though as you can no doubt imagine, with an all new user interface, these customizations have moved to different places.
Let’s dive just a bit into the specifics of these customizations. All of the following work just fine in Lightning
Experience, simply moving to a new location in the user interface.
•
Creating custom tabs and apps with Visualforce pages.
•
Creating custom buttons and links that lead to Visualforce pages.
•
Creating custom actions that open with a Visualforce page.
•
Overriding standard actions with Visualforce pages (with one exception that we’ll get to later).
•
Creating flows that use Visualforce pages.
•
Packaging Visualforce pages and components.
The changes in the user interface vary from minor to significant. Features customized with Visualforce move automatically when users change between Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic. You might need to give your users an initial orientation, but after that, they’ll be happy as clams.
There are other features, such as Visualforce email templates, that use Visualforce code behind the scenes.
These aren’t surfaced in the user interface directly, and so they remain unchanged.
For a screenshot-heavy visual tour of where various features have moved to, see the Use Visualforce in
Lightning Experience unit in the Visualforce & Lightning Experience module.
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What Works, but Needs Updating and Testing
The environment in which a Visualforce page runs when Lightning Experience is enabled is different than the standard Visualforce request. The technical details get pretty complex, but the simple version is that in Lightning Experience, Visualforce pages are embedded in an HTML iframe that’s displayed inside the
Lightning Experience app.
This change has a number of consequences that mostly have to do with JavaScript and accessing external apps. You’ll want to review your code and verify a few things before you certify your Visualforce pages for use in Lightning Experience. We’re saving the nitty gritty details for the Visualforce & Lightning Experience module. For now, let’s just check in at a high level so you can start to scope your review.
For starters, if you have pages or apps that use JavaScript, you’ll want to review the behavior of the code.
In particular, your code can’t directly access the window
global object. You can still get at it with a minor code change if you really need to, but there are probably better ways to accomplish those tasks using
Lightning Experience app APIs instead. In particular, code which sets window.location
directly should definitely be revised to integrate with the Lightning Experience navigation stack.
Similarly, code that assumes that it has access to the entire environment is in for a rude surprise. It still has access to the Visualforce part of the document, but not the full Lightning Experience app. That will be fine for many apps, but for those that want to be totally in charge, there’s going to be some work for you to do.
If your pages make use of iframes themselves, either with
<apex:iframe >
or static HTML, being embedded into another iframe could cause some issues. In many cases “turtles all the way down” is fine.
Just make sure you do extra testing here.
If your pages embed a Force.com Canvas app, and especially if you’ve used the Canvas APIs to integrate the app into Salesforce, allocate time for thorough testing as well. Canvas apps use an iframe, and while correctly behaving code should just work, we all know how common perfect code is in the real world.
Pages that use Remote Objects and JavaScript remoting work without requiring updates to authentication code. However, if your pages use other Salesforce APIs you might need to adapt your authentication code to make the right cross-domain request, or otherwise adjust to the new environment.
All of the above sounds both vague and hard to do but, in truth, the amount of code you’re likely to need to change is small. And again, the details for developers are available in the Visualforce & Lightning
Experience module.
What Doesn’t Work
And so we come to the, shall we say, less pleasant part of our conversation. Fortunately, the list of what doesn’t work in Visualforce for Lightning Experience is short, and we can get through it quickly.
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Perhaps the most significant change, in terms of things that might be hard to work around, Visualforce overrides of standard actions are slightly different in Lightning Experience compared to Salesforce Classic.
Any override for the object list action won’t be accessible in Lightning Experience.
Specifically, there are six standard actions you can override for an object in Salesforce Classic:
•
Object tab
•
Object list
•
Record view
•
Record edit
•
Record create
•
Record delete
In Lightning Experience the first two actions have been combined into one page, object home. Object home is similar to object list, with some elements of object tab, like recent items, added. Others, such as reports or tools, have moved to other parts of the user interface.
Regardless of the user interface settings in your organization, both object tab and object list are available to be overridden in Setup. Overriding the object tab action overrides the object home page in Lightning
Experience, as expected.
However, when in Lightning Experience, the object list action isn’t accessible in the user interface, so there’s no way to fire it. If your organization has overridden the object list action for any object, that functionality won’t be available when users are using Lightning Experience. If there are essential features in that override, you’ll need to find another way to make them available.
On a bit smaller scale, the showHeader
and sidebar
attributes of
<apex:page >
have no effect on Visualforce pages when displayed in Lightning Experience. The standard Salesforce Classic header and sidebar are always suppressed, and there isn’t a way to suppress the Lightning Experience header and sidebar.
A number of related lists available in Salesforce Classic aren’t supported in Lightning Experience. The
<apex:relatedList >
component isn’t a way around this limitation. Good try, though!
And, coming down to the really minor issues, rendering Visualforce pages as PDFs works exactly as in
Salesforce Classic, without any of the Lightning Experience visual design. This is probably what you want anyway, but if you wanted to render pages into PDFs that include the Lightning Experience design, that’s not possible today.
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That Look-and-Feel Thing
The first thing you notice about Lightning Experience is the gorgeous, all new visual design. And if you’ve been developing Visualforce pages for a while, your next thought might be, how will my Visualforce pages look in Lightning Experience. The short answer is…well, let’s sit down for this part, OK?
The short answer is, with the exception of suppressing the Salesforce Classic header and sidebar, and of being framed by the Lightning Experience user interface, Visualforce pages display unchanged in Lightning
Experience.
Specifically, the HTML that’s rendered by the built-in Visualforce components doesn’t change when the page displays in Lightning Experience, and the Salesforce Classic stylesheets those components use is, by default, loaded by the page. The effect is that pages that use
<apex:inputField >
,
<apex:outputField >
, the
<apex:pageBlock >
components, and other coarse- and fine-grained components that match the Salesforce Classic visual design, still match that visual design. You get a little slice of Salesforce Classic in the middle of your Lightning Experience.
If, however, you’ve used Visualforce components that are relatively unstyled, or your own components and markup, and developed your own stylesheets instead of using the default Salesforce styles, your pages also appear unchanged, retaining the styling you worked so hard to develop.
In other words, in Visualforce for Lightning Experience we’ve favored stability in the visual design of existing pages, instead of trying to adapt them dynamically to Lightning Experience.
That said, if you’re as excited about the new visual design as we are, there are ways for you to adopt that styling to a lesser or greater degree, depending on how much work you want to put in. We won’t cover it here, but there’s a whole unit, Understanding Important Visual Design Considerations, that shows the range of possibilities and the techniques to use to achieve them.
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CHAPTER 26 Lightning Components in Lightning
Experience
In this chapter ...
•
By now you’ve read the word “Lightning” so many times it’s probably lost all meaning. Worse, we’ve been talking so much about both “Lightning
Experience” and “Lightning components” that maybe the two terms are blurring together. Let’s clear up the relationship between the two.
Remember all that information about developing following either a page-centric or app-centric model? Salesforce Classic uses a page-centric model, but Lightning Experience uses an app-centric model. It’s made up of—you guessed it—components.
You can probably see where this is going. Lightning components were designed with Lightning Experience in mind. As the core Salesforce app shifts to the app-centric framework, we want you to shift along with us.
We want you to think about developing on the platform in a whole new way.
You might have developed some Lightning components in Salesforce
Classic. You can still use the old interface with Lightning components and all your existing component functionality transfers seamlessly into Lightning
Experience.
If you haven’t worked with Lightning components yet, don’t worry. There’s a Trailhead module, a quickstart guide, and a full developer’s guide so that you can start developing in no time. Before you dive in to the technical details, let’s take a second to review some basic advantages of Lightning components:
Out-of-the-Box Component Set
Salesforce provides a number of components to bootstrap your app development.
Performance
The component framework leverages a stateful client (using JavaScript) and a stateless server (using Apex). This structure allows the client to call the server only when absolutely necessary. With fewer calls to the server, your apps are more responsive and efficient.
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Event-Driven Architecture
Events are key to the Lightning component framework. Components listen to application and component events and respond accordingly.
Rapid Development
The simple markup and pre-made components mean that you can get applications out the door faster than ever. Particularly if you’re comfortable with Visualforce markup, learning component markup is a breeze.
Device-Aware and Cross-Browser Compatibility
A huge advantage of Lightning components is that you don’t have to worry about compatibility across devices and browsers. The component framework handles this work for you.
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Considerations for Use
We’ve covered some of the considerations for using Lightning components. You probably don’t want to switch to Lightning components with in-progress Visualforce projects. You also want to stick with Visualforce if you need to do things like render PDFs from a page. Visualforce hasn’t gone away, and remains a foundational part of developing on the Salesforce platform.
The Lightning Components framework is, relatively speaking, the new kid on the block—but this new kid has skills. While there are a few specific limitations of Lightning components, for the most part it’s ready to go. There are many situations where you should consider making the switch to developing with Lightning components. Salesforce mobile development, for example, is a great place to use Lightning components.
Also use Lightning components for new projects and any project involving highly interactive applications.
Let’s make a list! Where exactly can you use Lightning components? You have many options.
Lightning Experience
We said it earlier, but don’t want you to get the wrong idea by leaving it off this list. Lightning Experience and Lightning components are two great tastes that taste great together.
Salesforce App
We’re repeating this one often because it’s important: use Lightning components for your mobile development. When you’re using a mobile device, you don’t want to make a call to the server every time a user presses a button. Using Lightning components vastly improves mobile app performance.
Standalone Apps
If you used Lightning components in Salesforce Classic, you probably made at least one standalone
Lightning app. Lightning App Builder lets you declaratively create apps with standard components ranging from buttons to Canvas apps. Alternatively, use the Developer Console to create apps made up of both standard and custom Lightning components. See the Lightning Components Developer
Guide for more information.
Visualforce Pages
This capability is perfect for Salesforce developers who are Visualforce veterans. If you’re not quite ready to commit to a full Lightning app, smooth the transition by integrating components into
Visualforce pages. This task only requires a few lines of markup and gives you a huge amount of flexibility. See the Lightning Components Developer Guide for more information about Lightning
Components for Visualforce.
Anywhere!
Lightning Out, currently available in beta, lets you run your Lightning components and apps, well, pretty much anywhere you can serve a web page. Whether it’s a Node.js app running on Heroku, a department server inside the firewall, or even SharePoint (yes, SharePoint), build your custom app with Lightning components and run it wherever your users are.
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As much engineering effort as we’ve put into making Lightning components a framework you can use to create applications for the next decade, we’re not done. There’s still a few places where you can use
Visualforce to customize Salesforce but you can’t yet use Lightning components. Stay tuned to this channel.
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CHAPTER 27 Salesforce Partners, Packaging, and
AppExchange
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
If you’re a Salesforce AppExchange partner (ISV), you're probably wondering how Lightning Experience affects your development and release processes.
Do your existing products still work? Do you have to make major changes to existing procedures? What about future releases?
These are valid concerns, but we have good news. Many of the tools that you use to build, test, and distribute your products are available in Lightning
Experience. We also have resources to guide you as update your products to be Lightning Ready.
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Partner Tools in Lightning Experience
First, let’s talk tools. This conversation is bittersweet. Some of the tools that you use are available in Lightning
Experience, while others aren’t supported there yet. Here’s an overview of what’s supported right now.
Feature
•
Environment Hub
•
License Management App (LMA)
•
Checkout Management App (CMA)
Supported In
Both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience.
Salesforce Classic only.
•
Trialforce
•
Channel Order App (COA)
•
Usage Metrics Visualization App
This means you can go to Lightning Experience if you want to:
•
Create orgs for development, testing, and demos
•
Manage all your orgs from a single location
•
License and support apps published on the AppExchange
•
View and report on subscription data for products sold using AppExchange Checkout
To provision trial orgs or manage orders, you should stay in Salesforce Classic. As Lightning Experience continues to mature, more tools will become available.
Packaging Apps in Lightning Experience
When you’re ready to distribute an app, Lightning component, or other product, Lightning Experience is up to the task. The package manager lets you create and manage packages from Setup, just like you could in Salesforce Classic. Whether you’re creating managed packages in a Developer Edition or unmanaged packages in an Enterprise Edition, the new packaging experience feels right at home in your development process.
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AppExchange and Lightning Experience
If you offer a product on AppExchange, you probably have questions about getting Lightning Ready. We consider products Lightning Ready when all end-user use cases work as expected in Lightning Experience.
So, how long do you have to get Lightning Ready? The answer depends on the type of product and your distribution agreement with Salesforce. New products sold using AppExchange Checkout and new free products must be Lightning Ready before their security review. Other agreement types may require
Lightning Experience readiness depending on when you signed the agreement. For existing products, we encourage you to get Lightning Ready as soon as possible. For more information and resources, go to the
Lightning Ready page on the Salesforce Partner Community.
If you’re an AppExchange customer, look for the Lightning Ready certification on a product’s listing to verify that it’s compatible with Lightning Experience. You can use products that aren’t certified as Lightning
Ready in Lightning Experience, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll work as expected. It’s best to use them in Salesforce Classic.
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CHAPTER 28 Understand Changes to Other
Development Tools
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
•
•
•
This last unit is a bit of a grab bag. We’ve already covered all of the “hard” stuff, so at this point you’re in the home stretch. Can you feel it? That’s the itch you get when you’re close to a new badge. Let’s do this.
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Installed Packages in Lightning Experience
Managing your installed packages in Lightning Experience is the same as it ever was. The Installed Packages landing page is available in the Lightning Experience setup area. It looks and works the same way it does in Salesforce Classic.
Of course, finding and using this page isn’t the only thing on your mind. You’re also wondering whether your packages installed from AppExchange still work in Lightning Experience.
The best answer we can give is maybe. Apps listed on AppExchange are marked with a “Lightning Ready” sash if they’re fully compatible with Lightning Experience. Check the listing to see if an app is Lightning
Ready. If it’s not, you can still try to use it in Lightning Experience, but we recommend sticking to Salesforce
Classic to prevent unexpected behavior.
The API and Apex in Lightning Experience
As a developer, one of your most important tools on any platform is the API. As a Salesforce developer,
Apex is just as important to your success.
We’ve kept our promise that we won’t do anything that breaks your dependencies on our APIs. Your Apex code and queries continue to function as expected, regardless of whether you’re using Lightning Experience or Salesforce Classic. It really is just that simple. Breathe a sigh of relief.
Authentication and Security in Lightning Experience
Regardless of the user experience you’re developing for, security is still Salesforce’s top priority. Lightning
Experience doesn’t fall short of our promise to keep your organization’s data safe.
Continue to treat authentication and security as you do when developing for Salesforce Classic. The only difference in access controls between Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience is in the App Launcher.
The App Launcher is available by default to all users in your organization. While this change is of concern mostly to administrators, it’s important to work with your Salesforce admin to ensure that your development work is only seen by the people who are supposed to see it.
Canvas for Lightning Experience
Force.com Canvas allows you to easily integrate third party applications in Salesforce. Canvas functionality in Lightning Experience is the same as in Salesforce Classic. You can still embed Canvas apps in Visualforce
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Chapter 28 Understand Changes to Other Development Tools pages, the Salesforce app, and everywhere else they’re supported—with the added bonus that you can integrate Canvas apps in Lightning Components!
Salesforce Mobile for Lightning Experience
Lightning Experience and Salesforce mobile are like peanut butter and jelly. They’re made for each other.
Your mobile development practices in Lightning Experience are the same as they were in Salesforce Classic.
When we say the two were made for each other, we mean it. You might be familiar with the sforce.one
JavaScript object. In the past, it was used as an event mechanism for navigation in Salesforce mobile development. Now, you can also use it for navigation in Lightning Experience. See the Salesforce Mobile
App Developer’s Guide for more information.
Mobile SDK for Lightning Experience
By now you’re probably tired of reading overview information and are ready to dive in to the nitty-gritty technical details. We won’t keep you much longer. Literally just another two sentences!
As its own client, or front end, to Salesforce the Mobile SDK isn’t impacted by Lightning Experience. If you use Mobile SDK to develop mobile apps, you can rest easy.
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CHAPTER 29 Use Visualforce in Lightning
Experience
In this chapter ...
•
Lightning Experience brings an all new user interface to your Salesforce organization, but that doesn’t mean your Visualforce apps stop working.
Visualforce pages work in Lightning Experience, many without any revisions.
Things have moved around, though, and there are some chores you’ll want to complete to make sure your Visualforce pages work the way you expect as your users switch between Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.
And there are a very few features that, alas, don’t work in Lightning
Experience. We’ll get you sorted on all of it in this module.
Let’s start with a few basic details. These are topics we’ll cover in depth later, but let’s handle some essential items right up front.
•
With some important exceptions, Visualforce “just works” in Lightning
Experience. If you’ve written Visualforce apps for your organization, you can expect that they work whether your users access them in
Lightning Experience or Salesforce Classic.
•
If your Visualforce pages use the built-in standard components, their look-and-feel matches Salesforce Classic, whether your users access them in Lightning Experience or Salesforce Classic. If you want your pages to match the Lightning Experience styling, you have some work to do.
•
If your Visualforce pages make use of JavaScript, there are things you need to check. Visualforce doesn’t “own” the whole page when shown in Lightning Experience, and because of that your JavaScript code needs to play by some new rules.
•
There are other things that have changed about how Visualforce runs when it’s running inside Lightning Experience. For the most part, these are turning the “just works” crank, but you’ll want to be aware of them all the same.
And finally, did we mention that some things have moved around? Have they ever! Lightning Experience is a complete rethinking of how to use
Salesforce, and while the job’s not done yet, we’re really excited about
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Chapter 29 Use Visualforce in Lightning Experience where we’re going. To get you oriented for where your Visualforce is in the new environment, let’s take a quick tour of some of the places you can use Visualforce in Lightning Experience.
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Where You Can Use Visualforce in Lightning Experience
As with Salesforce Classic, you can extend Lightning Experience with your custom Visualforce pages and apps. But where you find them has changed, and there are still some places you can’t put Visualforce.
The following are some of the ways you can add Visualforce to your Lightning Experience organization.
This is just a quick tour, though. For more details on how to customize your organization using Visualforce pages, see the resources at the end of this unit.
Example:
Open a Visualforce Page from the App Launcher
Your Visualforce apps and custom tabs are all available from the App Launcher, which you reach by clicking in the header.
Click a custom app (1) to activate it. Items in the app display in the navigation bar, including any
Visualforce tabs you’ve added to the app. Note that you need to add your Visualforce pages to tabs for them to be accessible in the App Launcher. Visualforce tabs that aren’t in apps can be found in
All Items (2).
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Example:
Add a Visualforce Page to the Navigation Bar
As described in the preceding example, you can add Visualforce tabs to an app and they display as items in the app’s navigation bar.
(And hey, does a “ForceUI” utility page sound interesting? Keep reading this module!)
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Example:
Display a Visualforce Page within a Standard Page Layout
Extend your page layouts by embedding Visualforce pages on them to display completely custom content on a standard page. The behavior here is identical to Salesforce Classic, except you need to view the record’s Details to see the page layout.
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Example:
Add a Visualforce Page as a Component in the Lightning App Builder
When you create a custom app page in the Lightning App Builder, you can add a Visualforce page to the page by using the Visualforce component.
Note: You must enable
"Available for Lightning Experience, the
Salesforce app, and Lightning Communities"
for a Visualforce page to make it available in the Lightning App Builder.
Example:
Launch a Visualforce Page as a Quick Action
Although their placement in the Lightning Experience user interface is quite different from Salesforce
Classic, the process of adding quick actions is much the same. Add them to the appropriate publisher area on the object’s page layout.
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Example:
Display a Visualforce Page by Overriding Standard Buttons or Links
You can override the actions available on an object with a Visualforce page. When the user clicks a button or link that has been overridden, your page displays instead of the standard page. Setting this up is pretty much identical to Salesforce Classic. Indeed, you’ll have a hard time telling that you’re in Lightning Experience when defining an action override!
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Example:
Display a Visualforce Page Using Custom Buttons or Links
You can create new actions for your objects, in the form of buttons and links, by defining them on an object. JavaScript buttons and links aren’t supported in Lightning Experience, but Visualforce
(and URL) items are. The process of defining Visualforce buttons and links is identical to that in
Salesforce Classic, so we won’t bother to show it here.
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CHAPTER 30 Developing Visualforce Pages for
Lightning Experience
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
•
The development process for creating Visualforce pages and apps for
Lightning Experience is in some ways considerably different from developing for Salesforce Classic. In others, you’ll find it’s just the same.
The main difference is how you view and test your pages during development.
In this unit we’ll cover the details of getting your development environment set up, and then get into the details of the “right” way to test your pages while you’re in the process of building them. The good news is that the process you need to use to develop for Lightning Experience is the same you’ll use for developing Salesforce mobile pages as well.
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Set Up Your Editor
The first thing you’ll want to set up is the editing tool you’ll use for writing code. This process remains the same, whether you’re creating pages for Lightning Experience, Salesforce Classic, or the Salesforce app, and whether you’re using the Developer Console, the Force.com IDE, or the good old Setup editor.
If you’ve already got a preferred Visualforce editing tool, you don’t need to do anything here. Writing and saving your Visualforce markup remains exactly the same. The Developer Console has its own user interface, and doesn’t change between Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic. The editor in Setup is also unchanged, retaining the Salesforce Classic user interface in all user interface contexts. And of course if you’re using a native tool, such as the Force.com IDE or one of the many third-party tools available, those have their own user interfaces.
The one exception is the editor in the Visualforce Development Mode footer. If you’ve enabled Development
Mode in your user settings, and you’re using Salesforce Classic, then viewing and editing Visualforce pages with the Development Mode footer is unchanged, as you’d expect. If you switch to Lightning Experience, and then access a page using the traditional https://yourInstance.salesforce.com/apex/PageName
URL pattern, you might be somewhat surprised to find yourself back in Salesforce Classic.
This is expected, and we’ll talk about it more when we get to viewing and testing your Visualforce pages.
For now, know that Development Mode for Visualforce is only available in Salesforce Classic.
Viewing Visualforce Pages During Development
Viewing your Visualforce pages while they’re being developed is a common task. And while it’s not “testing” in the formal sense, you certainly want to be able to interact with functionality you’ve built to ensure it’s making progress towards correct behavior. This is frequently accomplished by accessing the page using the https://yourInstance.salesforce.com/apex/PageName
URL pattern. While this still works for reviewing pages in Salesforce Classic, it doesn’t work for checking behavior in Lightning
Experience.
Pages you view using direct URL access always display in Salesforce Classic, which is to say, the “classic”
Visualforce container, no matter what your user interface settings are. If you create Visualforce pages that have Lightning Experience-specific behavior, you won’t be able to review that behavior just by using the usual direct URL access.
Beyond the Basics
What’s going on behind the scenes that causes this? It’s pretty simple, really. In order to view your page in Lightning Experience, you need to access the Lightning Experience container app. This
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/one/one.app
. If you’re accessing that, you can’t access
/apex/PageName
. They’re just two different URLs that don’t overlap.
So what’s a developer to do? You need to view your page from within the Lightning Experience app itself, so that it’s running inside the Lightning Experience container. This means you’ll need to navigate to the page in Lightning Experience, and there’s a variety of ways to do that.
The simplest way to get to a specific Visualforce page is to create a tab for it, and then navigate to that tab via the All Items section in the App Launcher. A more long-term approach would be to create an “In
Development” app, and add your Visualforce tabs to it as you work on them, and move or remove them as they roll out to production. Since the controls for doing this have moved around a bit, here are brief instructions.
1. From Setup, enter
Apps
in the
Quick Find
box, then select App Manager.
You should see the
Lightning Experience App Manager
Setup page.
2. Click New Lightning App, and then create a custom app for your pages in development.
Consider restricting your app to only System Administrators, or a profile you’ve created for developers in your organization.
You don’t need your users to see your pages before they’re added to their permanent place in the user interface.
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3. From Setup, enter
App Menu
in the
Quick Find
box, then select App Menu.
You should see the
App Menu
Setup page.
4. Make sure your In Development app is set to
Visible in App Launcher
.
While you’re at it, you might want to rearrange items, and even hide apps you don’t use.
5. From Setup, enter
Tabs
in the
Quick Find
box, then select Tabs.
You should see the
Custom Tabs
Setup page.
6. Click New in the Visualforce Tabs section, and then create a custom tab for the page currently in
development.
Make the tab visible only to your development user profile, and add the tab only to your In
Development app.
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7. Repeat the previous step for each page you want to add to your In Development app. For adding
new pages in the future, this is the only step required.
For all that that’s an easy way to see your pages while you’re working on them, it doesn’t really compare to simply typing the page name into a URL. For a similarly low-overhead way to test your page in Lightning
Experience, you can type the following into your JavaScript console:
$A.get( "e.force:navigateToURL" ).setParams(
{ "url" : "/apex/
pageName
"}).fire();
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This JavaScript fires the Lightning Experience navigateToURL
event, and is the equivalent of entering in the classic
/apex/PageName
URL—you can even see that URL pattern in the code.
Note: You need to currently be in Lightning Experience for this technique to work. If you’re in
Salesforce Classic, the JavaScript code fails.
For something a little more convenient to use, add the following bookmarklet to your browser’s menu or toolbar. (We’ve wrapped this code for readability.) javascript:( function (){ var pageName = prompt( 'Visualforce page name:' );
$A.get( "e.force:navigateToURL" ).setParams(
{ "url" : "/apex/" + pageName}).fire();})();
This bookmarklet prompts you for a page name, and then fires the event to navigate directly to it. Useful!
Once you’ve navigated to the page you’re working on, you can simply use your browser’s reload command to refresh the page as you make changes.
Reviewing Visualforce Pages in Multiple Environments
If you’re creating pages that will be used in Lightning Experience, Salesforce Classic, and the Salesforce app, you’ll want to be able to review them in all environments while you’re working on them. To do so, you’ll need to open the page in multiple browsers and on multiple devices.
A Visualforce page that’s going to be used across the different Salesforce user interface contexts and form factors is tricky to review while you’re in development. You can toggle back and forth between Salesforce
Classic and Lightning Experience using the environment selector in the profile menu, but that’s going to get old quickly. And you can similarly play with your browser’s user agent settings to simulate the Salesforce mobile environment, but that’s even more cumbersome.
Instead, you’re going to want to use multiple browsers, or even multiple devices, to view your pages. And you’ll want to have access to at least one additional test user as well. Here’s an example of how you might set up your development environment.
Main Development Environment
This environment is where you work in Setup to make changes to your organization, like adding custom objects and fields, and maybe where you write actual code, if you use the Developer Console.
•
Browser: Chrome
•
User: Your developer user
•
User interface setting: Salesforce Classic
Review your page’s design and behavior in Salesforce Classic in this environment.
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Lightning Experience Review Environment
This environment is where you check your page’s design and behavior in Lightning Experience.
•
Browser: Safari or Firefox
•
User: Your test user
•
User interface setting: Lightning Experience
Salesforce Mobile Review Environment
This environment is for checking your page’s design and behavior in the Salesforce app.
•
Device: iOS or Android phone or tablet
•
Browser: Salesforce app
•
User: Your test user
•
User interface setting: Lightning Experience
Note: This is just an example setup, and you can use any modern browsers or mobile devices in yours, for both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience. The key is to use two different browsers so you can access both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience at once, and to use a real device to test with the Salesforce app.
This probably sounds pretty elaborate, and it is a bit of a chore to set up initially, especially if you’re champing at the bit to get coding. But keep in mind two things. First, once you’re set up, it’s done. And second, this workspace doesn’t just give you a great development environment, it also provides you with the environments you need for formal testing of your pages. Because you wouldn’t dream of putting your pages into production without formal testing, right?
Testing Your Visualforce Pages
Testing your Visualforce pages before deploying them into production is an essential development task.
When your organization adopts Lightning Experience the process of testing your pages becomes more complicated.
We just talked about the environments you need to set up for doing quick, informal testing while you’re developing your pages. The need for those environments also applies to testing your pages and apps formally. Rather than repeating them, let’s talk a bit about why you need these different environments.
The need to test your pages in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic is fairly obvious, but why can’t you do that testing in the same browser, with the same user? In fact, you can and you should. Your users can toggle back and forth between the different user interfaces, and you should verify that your pages work when they do so.
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But you also want to test pages in a more isolated and systematic fashion, so that you’re sure that what you’re testing is the page’s basic functionality, as separated as possible from the effects of other code, whether that code is yours, ours, the browser’s, or the device’s.
This highlights another testing issue. In the past we’ve suggested that it’s reasonable to do Salesforce mobile development on your desktop or laptop, and navigating to the
/one/one.app
URL used by the Salesforce app. This method doesn’t work anymore, because
/one/one.app
is shared by both the Salesforce app and Lightning Experience, depending on the device that connects to it. While you can fool
/one/one.app
by changing your browser’s user agent, this is a bad idea, an anti-pattern. The reason is that desktop and mobile browsers, even from the same vendor, behave differently—sometimes
very differently. You cannot do rigorous, formal testing unless you’re testing on every device and every browser you plan to support.
If you’re developing an individual page, or a basic app for identical devices, your “matrix” of the different factors might be simple. But for more ambitious projects, if you’re developing functionality that you need to support across a range of possibilities, your test plan should take into consideration the need to test across:
•
Each different supported device.
•
Each different supported operating system.
•
Each different supported browser—including the Salesforce app, which embeds its own.
•
Each different supported user interface context (Lightning Experience, Salesforce Classic, and the
Salesforce app).
Fortunately for your sanity, some of these factors collapse together, reducing the combinatorial explosion.
For example, most Apple mobile devices can be counted on to be updated to the latest version of iOS.
This means that the device, operating system, and browser are effectively only one combination. Your test plan might therefore choose to test only one iPhone and one iPad, updated to the latest iOS and Salesforce app.
A final word about testing. Another reason we strongly suggest your development and test environments be similar is so that you can start testing, full testing, early in the development process. We’ve found that it’s all too easy to put testing on secondary devices off until late in a project. When that happens it’s inevitably a setback when problems are discovered.
Test early, test often, test everything.
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Container
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
•
Visualforce Defaults and Environment
•
<apex:page> showHeader and sidebar Attributes
•
The largest difference between Visualforce in Lightning Experience and
Visualforce in Salesforce Classic is the environment it runs in. In Salesforce
Classic, Visualforce “owns” the page, the request, the environment.
Visualforce is the application container. But in Lightning Experience,
Visualforce runs inside an iframe that’s wrapped inside the larger Lightning
Experience container.
This change to the execution context has a number of effects on the way
Visualforce pages can affect the overall Salesforce application. We’ll talk about these changes in this unit, but save the full details of a few of them for their own units.
Note: This unit is a little more “under construction” than the rest.
The reason is simple: The impact of the issues described here is highly dependent on your code. We’ve worked really hard to make things
“just work” for you, and in most cases little or nothing here will show on your radar. But we can’t anticipate every way that you’re using
Visualforce. Here we’re outlining the general aspects of how
Lightning Experience affects Visualforce. When you have conversations with us, and as we learn more from you about actual impact, we can offer explanations with more details about how to address specific issues.
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The Outer Lightning Experience Container
Let’s start with the outer container, the Lightning Experience application. The Lightning Experience container is a “single-page application,” or SPA, which is accessed at the
/one/one.app
URL. The one.app
page loads, its code starts up, and that application code takes over the environment.
The process by which a single-page application loads its resources—usually a static HTML shell and a lot of JavaScript—is both interesting and complex. If you’ve worked with JavaScript frameworks like AngularJS or React, you’re reasonably familiar with the basics of how Lightning Experience, in the form of one.app
, starts up. And to be honest, the full details don’t matter. You don’t have any control over it, and the implementation continues to evolve.
Here’s what’s important to know: Lightning Experience, or one.app
, is in charge of the request. Your
Visualforce page is not. Your page needs to work within constraints that Lightning Experience imposes upon it. Lightning Experience is the parent context, and your Visualforce page is the child context. Children need to obey their parents.
Some of these constraints, such as the size of the frame in which your Visualforce page is displayed, are imposed directly by Lightning Experience. They’re easier to understand and work with, and we’ll talk about them in a minute.
Other constraints are implicit, and enforced not by Lightning Experience but by the browser running it.
These are mostly security and JavaScript execution constraints. Most pages aren’t impacted by these security constraints, and those that are usually fail early and with clear error messages. JavaScript errors are harder to discover and diagnose, but there are some general rules we’ll cover in a bit.
The Visualforce iframe
When your Visualforce page runs in Lightning Experience, it’s displayed inside an HTML iframe. An iframe creates an embedded browsing context that’s effectively a separate browser “window” from the main
Lightning Experience browsing context. The iframe creates a boundary between the Visualforce page and its parent, the Lightning Experience application.
The advantage of running Visualforce pages inside an iframe is that, for pages that don’t need to access or change the top-level browsing context, running inside the iframe looks almost exactly like running as a page in Salesforce Classic. This is why you don’t need to modify all of your Visualforce pages to adapt to the wildly different behind-the-scenes request environment of Lightning Experience. It’s an important part of the “just works” strategy for supporting Visualforce.
Of course, the flip side is that pages that do need to access the top-level browsing context, well, there’s some things that need to change. We’ll cover some specifics in the next section.
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If your page is communicating with services besides Salesforce, the iframe boundary might also result in you needing to update your organization’s CORS settings, remote site settings, clickjack settings, or content security policy. Since these depend on security policies and settings outside of Salesforce, we can’t provide a recipe for specific changes. We simply call it to your attention here.
Impact of the New Container
The effects of the new Visualforce container—embedding the Visualforce page into an iframe within the
Lightning Experience app—can be broadly divided into two categories, which we’ll call security and scope.
Again, we want to emphasize: many, or even most Visualforce pages won’t be affected by these issues.
But for those that are, we’re thinking “forewarned is forearmed.” You’ll find the source of the problem faster if we’ve already talked about it together.
Security Impact
Elements of security that might be affected include the following.
•
Session maintenance and renewal
•
Authentication
•
Cross-domain requests
•
Embedding restrictions
We discussed a few of these briefly already, the items dealing with cross-domain requests. That is, when the content in the full browser window comes from requests to different servers and services, there’s the potential for any of those requests to balk at being displayed in a context that it’s not prepared for. Your mission, should the need arise, is to prepare those services to handle requests intended to be put together within the Lightning Experience context. As we said before, the details vary, so we can’t provide specific answers here.
One thing we do want to mention specifically is session maintenance. A “session” for our purposes here is basically some kind of token that your browser re-uses from request to request so that you don’t need to enter your username and password for every request. You often need to access the current session using the global variable
$Api.Session_ID
.
Here’s the thing to keep in mind.
$Api.Session_ID
returns different values depending on the domain of the request. This is because the session ID varies during a session whenever you cross a hostname boundary, such as
.salesforce.com
to
.visual.force.com
. Normally Salesforce transparently handles session hand-off between domains, but if you’re passing the session ID around yourself, be aware that you might need to re-access
$Api.Session_ID
from the right domain to ensure a valid session
ID.
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Lightning Experience and Visualforce pages are not only held in different browser contexts, they’re also served from different domains. So, even though it’s all showing in one browser window, the session ID
inside the Visualforce iframe will be different than the session ID outside the iframe, in another part of
Lightning Experience. Salesforce and Lightning Experience handle this transparently in normal use. But if you’re passing around the session ID like hors d'oeuvre at a party (not usually a good idea), you might need to review how you’re handling it.
Scope Impact
When we talk about scope we’re mainly talking about the following kinds of things.
•
DOM access and modification
•
JavaScript scope, visibility, and access
•
JavaScript global variables such as window.location
If this list sounds complicated or confusing, don’t worry, we can boil it down to something simple and easy to remember: Don’t touch someone else’s stuff. Specifically, your JavaScript code (and stylesheet rules, for that matter) can affect elements—DOM nodes, JavaScript variables, and so on—in your page’s browsing context, but it can’t access elements in any other browsing context, like the parent Lightning
Experience context. Don’t touch other contexts’ stuff!
Practically speaking, the most common code pattern where you’d want to do this kind of thing is to manipulate window.location
to navigate to another page. This is such a common thing to do, we’ve written up details on this specific issue...well, by the time you’re done with this module, you’ll be sick of hearing about it, we promise.
One last note. If you’re an experienced JavaScript developer, you’re probably already thinking you know how to deal with “I don’t have access to the parent browsing context” issues, by using contentWindow
, window.parent
, or the like. Please don’t. You’ll likely run afoul of the same-origin policy (Visualforce and Lightning Experience are served from different domains, remember?). Even if you don’t, you’re probably replacing obvious, blocking bugs with subtle, intermittent bugs. Where do you want to spend your time:
Doing things right, or the debugger?
Doing things right means calling APIs we’ve made available in your Visualforce pages, primarily for navigation. If you really need to affect things across frame boundaries, use window.postMessage
to send a message to receiving code in the other frame.
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Visualforce Defaults and Environment Changes in
Lightning Experience
When your Visualforce pages run in Lightning Experience a number of low-level changes happen behind the scenes. These changes enable most pages to “just work” in the Lightning Experience container, and sometimes you can just be happy they’re there. But you’ll still want to know they’re happening, especially when you’re working on advanced application flows, or troubleshooting a tricky problem.
Some of these changes are simple, and obvious once you think about them. For example, Visualforce pages that run in Lightning Experience always have the standard Salesforce Classic header and sidebar suppressed. Other changes aren’t as visible, but have just as large an impact.
<apex:page > showHeader
and
sidebar
Attributes
Are Always
false
These attributes affect the Salesforce Classic header and sidebar on Visualforce pages. The Salesforce Classic header and sidebar are always suppressed when pages run in Lightning Experience, in favor of Lightning
Experience navigation elements. There are no corresponding attributes to affect the Lightning Experience header or sidebar because they can’t be suppressed.
If your page is shared between Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience, you can still set these attributes to the values you’d like to use when the page runs in Salesforce Classic.
Note: The standardStylesheets
attribute of
<apex:page >
, which determines whether to include or suppress the standard Salesforce Classic stylesheets, is unaffected by Lightning
Experience. That is, it defaults to true
in Lightning Experience, but you’re able to change it.
The
sforce.one
JavaScript Utility Object
Although sforce.one
sounds like a droid working in the Salesforce cantina,
*
it’s actually a utility object that provides a number of useful functions you can use in your own JavaScript code.
sforce.one
is automatically injected into your page when it runs in Lightning Experience or the
Salesforce app. You’ll see it in your JavaScript debugger console and web developer resources list. There’s nothing you need to do to add it, and there’s no way to suppress it, either. (Sadly, there’s no way to get sforce.one
in your Visualforce pages in Salesforce Classic.) sforce.one
is primarily used to fire navigation events. The full details are in an upcoming unit, Managing
Navigation .
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____________________
*
There is no Salesforce cantina. Alas.
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Classic and Lightning Experience
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
•
Lightning Experience via SOQL and API
We recommend that, wherever possible, you create Visualforce pages that behave correctly whether they run in Salesforce Classic or Lightning
Experience. The benefits in terms of reduced complexity in your organization’s code and configuration are obvious. And there are a number of contexts, such as Visualforce overrides of standard actions, where you don’t have a choice. An action override always uses the same page, whether you’re running in Salesforce Classic, Lightning Experience, or the Salesforce app.
It’s perfectly reasonable, though, to want slightly or significantly different behavior or styling that’s based on the user experience context in which the page is running. In this unit we’ll look at a variety of ways to create pages that work correctly in all user experiences, and how your code can detect and make changes for specific contexts.
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Detecting and Responding to the User Experience
Context in Visualforce Markup
Use the
$User.UITheme
and
$User.UIThemeDisplayed
global variables to determine the current user experience context. You can use these variables in Visualforce expressions to adapt your pages to Lightning Experience, Salesforce Classic, and the Salesforce app.
These global variables return a string that uniquely identifies the current user interface context. The possible values for
$User.UITheme
and
$User.UIThemeDisplayed
are the same:
•
Theme1
—Obsolete Salesforce theme
•
Theme2
—Salesforce Classic 2005 user interface theme
•
Theme3
—Salesforce Classic 2010 user interface theme
•
Theme4d
—Modern “Lightning Experience” Salesforce theme
•
Theme4t
—Salesforce mobile app Salesforce theme
•
PortalDefault
—Salesforce Customer Portal theme
•
Webstore
—Salesforce AppExchange theme
The difference between the two variables is that
$User.UITheme
returns the look and feel the user is supposed to see, while
$User.UIThemeDisplayed
returns the look and feel the user actually sees. For example, a user may have the preference and permissions to see the Lightning Experience look and feel, but if they are using a browser that doesn’t support that look and feel, for example, older versions of Internet Explorer,
$User.UIThemeDisplayed
returns a different value. In general, your code should use
$User.UIThemeDisplayed
.
The simplest way to use these theme globals is to use one in a Boolean expression, like
{!
$User.UIThemeDisplayed == "Theme3" }
, in the rendered
attribute of a component.
The component will only display if the page appears in the desired user interface context.
<apex:outputText value= "This is Salesforce Classic." rendered= "{! $User.UIThemeDisplayed == 'Theme3' }" />
Although you can use this technique on individual user interface elements, it’s usually more efficient if you wrap larger chunks of markup into an
<apex:outputPanel >
or similar block-level component, and then create separate blocks for each different UI you want to present. Then place the theme test on the rendered
attribute of the blocks, rather than the individual components. Not only should this perform better, your code will be less complicated.
<apex:outputPanel rendered= "{! $User.UIThemeDisplayed == 'Theme3' }" >
<apex:outputText value= "This is Salesforce Classic." />
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<apex:outputText value= "These are multiple components wrapped by an outputPanel." />
</apex:outputPanel >
<apex:outputPanel rendered= "{! $User.UIThemeDisplayed == 'Theme4d' }" >
<apex:outputText value= "Everything is simpler in Lightning
Experience." />
</apex:outputPanel >
Another strategy you can use this with is to dynamically select a stylesheet to include on your page, and provide a different stylesheet for each theme. This is a bit trickier than you might think, because the
<apex:stylesheet >
tag doesn’t have a rendered
attribute of its own. In this case, you must wrap the stylesheet components within another component that does have a rendered
attribute.
Here’s an example of how to provide a different stylesheet for each of the three modern themes supported by Salesforce.
<apex:page standardController= "Account" >
<!-- Salesforce Classic "Aloha" theme -->
<apex:variable var= "uiTheme" value= "classic2010Theme" rendered= "{!$User.UIThemeDisplayed == 'Theme3'}" >
<apex:stylesheet value= "{!URLFOR($Resource.AppStyles,
'classic-styling.css' )} " />
</apex:variable >
<!-- Lightning Desktop theme -->
<apex:variable var= "uiTheme" value= "lightningDesktop" rendered= "{!$User.UIThemeDisplayed == 'Theme4d'}" >
<apex:stylesheet value= "{!URLFOR($Resource.AppStyles,
'lightning-styling.css' )} "
/>
</apex:variable >
<!-- Salesforce mobile theme -->
<apex:variable var= "uiTheme" value= "Salesforce1" rendered= "{!$User.UIThemeDisplayed == 'Theme4t'}" >
<apex:stylesheet value= "{!URLFOR($Resource.AppStyles,
'mobile-styling.css' )} " />
</apex:variable >
<!-- Rest of your page -->
<p >
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</p >
Value of $User.UIThemeDisplayed: {! $User.UIThemeDisplayed }
</apex:page >
Beyond the Basics
This is an unusual way to use
<apex:variable >
, because we’re not actually interested in the value of the variable created. Instead we just want a component that doesn’t render any output of its own to wrap the
<apex:stylesheet >
component. You can think of this as
<apex:variable >
“lending” its rendered
attribute to the wrapped
<apex:stylesheet >
component.
It’s a good thing we don’t care about the variable itself, because another unusual aspect of wrapping the
<apex:variable >
component around something else is that the variable isn’t actually created! Feature or bug? Let’s call it...undefined behavior, and avoid using the uiTheme
variable elsewhere.
Detecting and Responding to the User Experience
Context in JavaScript
Detecting the current user experience context in JavaScript code is important if you’re using JavaScript heavily in your pages and apps. It’s especially important for using the right technique to manage navigation in your JavaScript code. The best way to handle UX context detection in your JavaScript code is with a library of utility functions you can use everywhere.
At first this seems simple, just test against the same global variables available in Visualforce markup. Maybe something like this.
function isLightningDesktop() { return ( "{! $User.UIThemeDisplayed }" == "Theme4d" );
}
And if you add this code to a Visualforce page, lo, it works.
Here’s the problem. As soon as you move this code into a static resource—a best practice for code organization, improving performance, and other reasons—it stops working, because global variables aren’t available in static resources. Static resources aren’t processed for markup or expressions or globals—or at all. They’re simply served up. It’s why we call them static resources. ;-)
So how do we make this work, without putting duplicate JavaScript code in every page that needs to test for the user experience context? By creating a very simple page that does nothing but inject the
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$User.UIThemeDisplayed
value into the right JavaScript context, and then using
<apex:include >
to add it to a page. Then we can test against the injected value in our actual utility code.
Here’s the “shim” Visualforce page that we use to inject the
$User.UIThemeDisplayed
global variable into a JavaScript context, as well as include the JavaScript utility static resource that uses it.
<apex:page docType= "html-5.0" applyBodyTag= "false" applyHtmlTag= "false" showHeader= "false" standardStylesheets= "false" >
<!-- UIUTILS SCRIPT -->
<apex:includeScript value= "{!URLFOR($Resource.ForceUI)}" />
<!-- UIUTILS SCRIPT -->
<!-- UITHEME INJECTOR -->
<script type= "text/javascript" >
(function(myContext){
// Don 't overwrite ourself if we already exist.
myContext.ForceUI = myContext.ForceUI || {};
// Because this is Visualforce, not a static resource,
// we can access a global variable in an expression.
myContext.ForceUI.UserUITheme = '{! $User.UIThemeDisplayed }' ;
})(this);
</script >
<!-- UITHEME INJECTOR -->
</apex:page >
This page does two things. First, it pulls in the JavaScript static resource that contains the actual utility method code. (Which, I promise, we will get to.) Second, it has an inline JavaScript that, because it’s running in a Visualforce page instead of a static resource, can evaluate an expression with the theme global. This script sets a variable inside the
ForceUI
utility object. This copies the theme value from Visualforce into
JavaScript, so that it can be referenced by the JavaScript code that’s in the static resource.
This “page” isn’t intended to be accessed directly, but rather included into your real pages. This makes the work of adding the JavaScript utility methods a single line in those pages. (Raise your hand if you remember when
#include
wasn’t something you did on social media. Right there with you. Now let’s get those kids off that lawn!)
Let’s look at how this is used. Here’s a very simple page that shows how to add the JavaScript utility methods to the page, using the
<apex:include >
component within the
<head >
block. At the bottom of
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We’ve added emphasis to the code to highlight these elements.
<apex:page standardController= "Account" extensions= "ForceUIExtension" showHeader= "false" standardStylesheets= "false" applyHtmlTag= "false" applyBodyTag= "false" docType= "html-5.0" title= "ForceUI Utilities" >
<html lang= "en" >
<head >
<title >ForceUI Utilities </title >
<apex:include pageName="UIThemeUtilsInclude"/>
</head >
<body >
<h1 >ForceUI Utilities </h1 >
<p >This is a page used for testing different ways of determining the user interface context in which it 's being displayed.</p>
<h2 >$User.UITheme Global Variable </h2 >
<p > <label >$User.UITheme
</label >: {! $User.UITheme } </p >
<p > <label >$User.UIThemeDisplayed
</label >: {! $User.UIThemeDisplayed
} </p >
<h2 >UIUtils JavaScript </h2 >
<p > <label >ForceUI.UserUITheme
</label >:
<span id= "UserUIThemeJS" >(loading...) </span > </p >
<p > <label >isSalesforce1() </label >:
<span id= "isSalesforce1JS" >(loading...) </span > </p >
<p > <label >isLightningExperience() </label >:
<span id= "isLightningExperienceJS" >(loading...) </span > </p >
<p > <label >isSalesforceClassic() </label >:
<span id= "isSalesforceClassicJS" >(loading...) </span > </p >
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ForceUI.UserUITheme;
// Instead, use these utility methods document.getElementById( 'isSalesforce1JS' ).innerHTML =
ForceUI.isSalesforce1(); document.getElementById( 'isLightningExperienceJS' ).innerHTML
=
<script type= "text/javascript" > document.addEventListener( 'DOMContentLoaded' , function(event){
// Diagnostic only -- don 't use this value directly document.getElementById( 'UserUIThemeJS' ).innerHTML =
ForceUI.isLightningExperience(); document.getElementById( 'isSalesforceClassicJS' ).innerHTML
=
ForceUI.isSalesforceClassic();
});
</script >
</body >
</html >
</apex:page >
View this page in your org, in Lightning Experience, Salesforce Classic, and even the Salesforce app to confirm that the values changes depending on the environment.
Finally (
#finally
), here’s the utility library that contains the JavaScript utility functions that let you create if expressions to conditionally affect the results of your app’s JavaScript code based on the user interface context it’s running in.
// This is an anonymous self-executing function closure thingie,
// like all the cool kids are using these days.
( function (myContext){
// Deal with possible order-of-execution issues.
// Don't overwrite ourself if we already exist.
myContext.ForceUI = myContext.ForceUI || {};
// Utility methods that make simple string comparisons
// against a local UserUITheme value. This value is
// injected from a Visualforce page to allow expression
// evaluation of the $User.UIThemeDisplayed global.
myContext.ForceUI.isSalesforceClassic = function () { return ( this .UserUITheme == 'Theme3' );
} myContext.ForceUI.isLightningExperience = function () { return ( this .UserUITheme == 'Theme4d' );
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} myContext.ForceUI.isSalesforce1 = function () { return ( this .UserUITheme == 'Theme4t' );
}
})( this );
Except for the possibly unfamiliar syntax of the self-executing function, the code here is laughably simple.
The result of the code executing is a utility object,
ForceUI
, added to the global scope of your page.
The object receives, from the injector JavaScript in the earlier Visualforce shim page, the value of the
$User.UIThemeDisplayed
global variable. This value is saved in a local variable named
UserUITheme
, which you should treat as a private implementation detail. Never access it directly!
The public API of the object is exposed as a series of functions, isLightningExperience()
and so on, which you use in the rest of your code as illustrated above. You can even add your own additional functions, for example, to tell mobile from desktop, or one.app
from plain Visualforce.
Determining the User Experience Context in Apex
Use the
UserInfo.getUiTheme()
and
UserInfo.getUiThemeDisplayed()
system methods to determine the current user experience context in Apex code. You can use them when your controller action methods or properties need to behave differently in different contexts.
The following example illustrates how to use these methods by making them available via getter methods in a controller extension.
public with sharing class ForceUIExtension {
// Empty constructor, required for Visualforce controller extension
{ } public ForceUIExtension(ApexPages.StandardController controller)
// Simple accessors for the System.UserInfo theme methods public String getContextUserUiTheme() { return UserInfo.getUiTheme();
} public String getContextUserUiThemeDisplayed() { return UserInfo.getUiThemeDisplayed();
}
}
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You could of course work with the values in your Apex code, rather than directly returning the method call results.
These Apex system methods return a string that uniquely identifies the current user interface context. The possible values returned by these methods are the same as those returned by the
$User.UITheme
and
$User.UIThemeDisplayed
global variables.
•
Theme1
—Obsolete Salesforce theme
•
Theme2
—Salesforce Classic 2005 user interface theme
•
Theme3
—Salesforce Classic 2010 user interface theme
•
Theme4d
—Modern “Lightning Experience” Salesforce theme
•
Theme4t
—Salesforce mobile app Salesforce theme
•
PortalDefault
—Salesforce Customer Portal theme
•
Webstore
—Salesforce AppExchange theme
Using these methods in server-side controller code should be rare, at least compared to providing different
Visualforce markup or JavaScript code. It’s a best practice for your controller and controller extension code to be neutral in terms of the UX context. Let your front end code, whether Visualforce or JavaScript, handle the user interface differences.
Querying for Lightning Experience via SOQL and API
Access
Although we don’t recommend this technique, you can query for the current user’s preferred user experience directly using SOQL.
The basic SOQL query is the following.
SELECT UserPreferencesLightningExperiencePreferred FROM User WHERE Id
= '
CurrentUserId
'
The result is a raw preference value, which you need to convert into something useable.
Here’s just about the simplest possible Visualforce page that runs the above SOQL query and displays the result on the page.
<apex:page >
<script src= "/soap/ajax/36.0/connection.js" type= "text/javascript" > </script >
<script type= "text/javascript" >
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Chapter 32 Sharing Visualforce Pages Between Classic and Lightning Experience
// Query for the preference value sforce.connection.sessionId = '{! $Api.Session_ID }' ; var uiPrefQuery = "SELECT Id,
UserPreferencesLightningExperiencePreferred " +
"FROM User WHERE Id = '{! $User.Id }'" ; var userThemePreferenceResult = sforce.connection.query(uiPrefQuery);
=
// Display the returned result on the page document.addEventListener( 'DOMContentLoaded' , function(event){ document.getElementById( 'userThemePreferenceResult' ).innerHTML
userThemePreferenceResult;
});
</script >
<h1 >userThemePreferenceResult (JSON) </h1 >
<pre > <span id= "userThemePreferenceResult" /> </pre >
</apex:page >
Querying for the user’s Lightning Experience preference directly is discouraged. The result tells you what the user’s current preference setting is, not what user experience actually is on their screen. There are several use cases where the preference value might not reflect the user experience that’s actually being delivered. To determine the actual user experience being delivered in the current request, use
$User.UIThemeDisplayed
or
UserInfo.getUiThemeDisplayed()
.
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CHAPTER 33 Managing Navigation
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
•
Navigation Gotchas, and How to Fix Them
App flow and navigation is in many ways the heart of application design.
Visualforce provides a number of ways to add navigation elements and to direct application flow. Lightning Experience adds its own application flow, navigation elements, and mechanisms for affecting where users go as they use Salesforce.
The good news is that “classic” Visualforce navigation continues to work.
The better news is that your Visualforce pages can take advantage of the new Lightning Experience mechanisms, too.
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Chapter 33 Managing Navigation
Navigation in Lightning Experience
Before we talk about the details of Visualforce navigation, and how you create it so that it works in Salesforce
Classic and Lightning Experience, let’s talk a little about navigation in general. What do we actually mean by “navigation”?
The first thing we might mean by navigation is user interface elements on the screen. You click something, and something happens. For example, you click the Accounts item in the navigation menu, and you go to the Accounts object home page. You click the New button, and a record entry form appears. You choose a custom action from a quick actions menu, and you launch a custom process. And so on. Those buttons and menu items are navigation elements.
The design of the navigation system, the user interface in Lightning Experience, is very different from
Salesforce Classic. We’re not going to talk about those differences here, but you’ll want to be familiar with where everything moves when you switch between the two user experiences. You can learn more about that right here in Trailhead, in the Navigating Lightning Experience and Setup unit.
Another, less visible kind of navigation is the “something happens” part of the above. Behind the scenes,
Salesforce decides what’s going to happen when you select an item in a menu, or click a link or button.
Much of this navigation is built into Salesforce already, while other aspects are customizable—for example, overriding actions with Visualforce pages. But all of this navigation is managed by code written by Salesforce.
And then there’s navigation in your own apps—apps that use your code to control application flow. When your custom action opens a form and the user clicks save, where do you go? When your running code makes a decision about where the user should go next, and sends them there. This is what we’re going to talk about in this unit.
Classic Visualforce Navigation
“Classic” Visualforce navigation can be boiled down to “what happens at the end of an action method.”
Action methods return a
PageReference
object with the details of where the user is to be navigated to, and then the Visualforce framework handles the details of sending the right response back to the user’s browser. And, great news, all of this still works.
Remember also that the Standard Controller returns a
PageReference
from its action methods. So, your existing navigation, whether you’re using the Standard Controller or your own custom controller code, continues to work as you expect.
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Modern Visualforce Navigation
So, if classic Visualforce navigation works, why are we still talking about this? What are we even having a conversation about? We just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? … “JavaScript.”
There’s a great future in JavaScript—and that future is here today. Many Visualforce developers are using
JavaScript heavily in their apps, and that use continues to grow. Classic Visualforce works, and will continue to work for a long time. But as developers adopt Visualforce features such as Remote Objects and JavaScript remoting, more of their apps’ behavior migrates from the server side, where
PageReference
is the rule, to the browser and JavaScript, where there’s no such thing as a
PageReference
.
In the Lightning Experience (and the Salesforce app) world, there are rules and tools for building navigation in JavaScript. We’ll cover the rules, which are mostly about what not to do, in a little bit. Let’s talk about the right way to do things first.
Lightning Experience manages navigation using events. The navigation event framework is made available as a JavaScript utility object that provides a number of functions that make creating programmatic navigation straightforward. The sforce.one
object is automatically added to Visualforce pages when they run in Lightning Experience. This object provides a number of functions that trigger navigation events when the functions are called. To use these functions, you can call them directly from your page’s JavaScript code, or you can attach calls as click (or other) handlers to elements on the page.
Important: The sforce.one
object isn’t available in Salesforce Classic. Any code that uses it should test for the existence of sforce.one
first.
The sforce.one
object provides the following functions. Reference the function using dotted notation from the sforce.one
object. For example: sforce.one.navigateToSObject(...)
.
Function
back([refresh])
Description
Navigates to the previous state that’s saved in the sforce.one
history. It’s equivalent to clicking a browser’s Back button.
Navigates to an sObject record, specified by recordId
.
navigateToSObject( recordId[, view]) navigateToURL(url[, isredirect])
Navigates to the specified URL.
navigateToFeed( subjectId, type)
Navigates to the feed of the specified type
, scoped to the subjectId
.
navigateToFeedItemDetail( feedItemId)
Navigates to the specific feed item, feedItemId
, and any associated comments.
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Chapter 33 Managing Navigation
Function Description
navigateToRelatedList( relatedListId, parentRecordId)
Navigates to a related list for the parentRecordId
.
navigateToList( listViewId, listViewName, scope)
Navigates to the list view that’s specified by the listViewId
, which is the ID of the list view to be displayed.
createRecord( entityName[, recordTypeId])
Opens the page to create a new record for the specified for example, “Account” or “MyObject__c”.
entityName editRecord(recordId)
Opens the page to edit the record specified by recordId
.
,
For additional details about using these functions, and the parameters they accept, see Navigation with the sforce.one
Object in this unit’s Resources.
Navigation Gotchas, and How to Fix Them
The first rule for building Visualforce navigation in JavaScript is: do not set window.location
directly.
The second rule for building Visualforce navigation in JavaScript is: do not set window.location
directly.
Don’t Set
window.location
Directly
OK, gratuitous repetition and movie reference aside, what’s the big deal here? It’s pretty simple. When in
Lightning Experience your page doesn’t have a window.location
to set! Remember all the earlier discussion about the Visualforce “container,” and being in an iframe, and Lightning Experience being some kind of health club? (SPA—single-page application.) This is one of the things that falls out of it. The
Visualforce iframe doesn’t have direct access to the window.location
value, so you can’t set it. If your code depends on setting it, it’ll break. That is, actions that fire navigation by setting window.location
will simply stop navigating to wherever you were expecting to go.
There’s actually a way around this restriction, but you shouldn’t use it. The reason is if you bypass the navigation functions in sforce.one
, your navigation events won’t be tracked in the Lightning Experience navigation stack. That stack provides useful features, like Back buttons that account for redirects and the
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Chapter 33 Managing Navigation like. A number of features in Lightning Experience (and especially in the Salesforce app) depend on that stack containing all navigation events. It’s worth making sure you use it correctly.
The Salesforce Classic Issue
So, yeah, there’s this one…thing. Unfortunately, the sforce.one
utility object isn’t available when your page runs in Salesforce Classic. In that context, you have to use window.location
. The good news is, in Salesforce Classic, window.location
is available. The bad news is, this limitation means you’ll have to add an ugly if
block to your code. Consider wrapping your navigation functions in utility methods that deal with this complexity, so that your main navigation logic can be straightforward.
Static URLs
Don’t use static URLs to Salesforce resources. That is, if you’re adding a link to edit a Contact record, don’t create the link by building a string with a static pattern like link = '/' + accountId + '/e'
.
In some contexts this works, but in others it doesn’t. Instead, try one of these approaches:
•
In Visualforce markup, use
{!URLFOR($Action.Contact.Edit, recordId)}
•
In JavaScript, use navigateToSObject(recordId)
There are actions and functions for viewing, creating, editing, and so on. Use them, rather than URL strings.
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CHAPTER 34 Understanding Important Visual
Design Considerations
In this chapter ...
•
Affecting the Styling of Standard
•
•
Visualforce pages look the same whether they are running in Salesforce
Classic or Lightning Experience, unless you rework them to adapt to the appropriate user interface context. Built-in Visualforce components that display user interface elements aren’t easily restyled to match the Lightning
Experience look-and-feel.
Specifically, the HTML that’s rendered by the built-in Visualforce components doesn’t change when the page displays in Lightning
Experience, and the Salesforce Classic stylesheets those components use is, by default, loaded by the page. The effect is that pages that use
<apex:inputField >
,
<apex:outputField >
, the
<apex:pageBlock >
components, and other coarse- and fine-grained components that match the Salesforce Classic visual design, still match that visual design. You get a little slice of Salesforce Classic in the middle of your Lightning Experience.
It’s our general recommendation that—for now, for existing pages—you don’t try to adapt them to match the visual design of Lightning Experience.
Lightning Experience is still evolving, and matching its styling yourself means you’re chasing a moving target. That’s work.
Nevertheless, in some cases you’ll want some pages to match more closely with Lightning Experience visuals. For new pages, or if you’re willing to do some work, there are some great tools for creating pages that fit in perfectly with Lightning Experience.
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Chapter 34 Understanding Important Visual Design Considerations
Affecting the Styling of Standard Components
Visualforce provides a range of options for adjusting or overriding the styling of the standard components.
If your goal is to make modest changes to the appearance of these components, the effort to use these options is similarly modest. Let’s look at a few of the tools you have available for affecting styling.
Styling Individual Components
Visualforce components that produce HTML have pass-through style
and styleClass
attributes.
These attributes allow you to use your own styles and style classes to control the look and feel of the resulting HTML. style
allows you to set styles directly on a component, while styleClass
lets you attach classes for styles defined elsewhere. For example, the following code sets the class of the
<apex:outputText >
and applies a style.
<apex:page >
<style type= "text/css" >
.asideText { font-style: italic; }
</style >
<apex:outputText style= "font-weight: bold;" value= "This text is styled directly." />
<apex:outputText styleClass= "asideText" value= "This text is styled via a stylesheet class." />
</apex:page >
Adding a Custom Stylesheet
You can add your own custom stylesheets to any Visualforce page using static resources and the
<apex:stylesheet >
tag. For example, to add a stylesheet that’s been uploaded as a static resource named “AppStylesheet”, add the following to your page.
<apex:stylesheet value= "{!$Resource.AppStylesheet}" />
You can then refer to any of the styles contained in the stylesheet, and reference them in Visualforce tag styleClass
attributes, as we did with the asideText
style previously.
This is the recommended method for adding CSS style definitions to Visualforce pages, because it shares the stylesheet between pages, and minimizes the markup you need to add to each page.
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Chapter 34 Understanding Important Visual Design Considerations
The exception to this method for adding a stylesheet is the Salesforce Lightning Design System. The
Lightning Design System is a fantastic all-new toolkit for styling your pages, and we’ll talk about it in detail shortly.
Although you can upload the Lightning Design System as a static resource and reference it using
<apex:stylesheet>
, there’s an easier way: Just include
<apex:slds />
anywhere in the markup of your page.
Different Styles in Lightning Experience
To load a custom stylesheet only when your page is running in Lightning Experience, use the following markup. This is similar to the Visualforce markup example in Sharing Visualforce Pages Between Classic and Lightning Experience .
<apex:page standardController= "Account" >
<!-- Base styles -->
<apex:stylesheet value= "{!URLFOR($Resource.AppStyles,
'app-styles.css')}" />
<!-- Lightning Desktop extra styles -->
<apex:variable var= "uiTheme" value= "lightningDesktop" rendered= " {!$User.UIThemeDisplayed == 'Theme4d'} ">
<apex:stylesheet value= "{!URLFOR($Resource.AppStyles,
'lightning-styling.css')}" />
</apex:variable >
<!-- Rest of your page -->
</apex:page >
OK, these are tools. Let’s look at a few techniques for using them next.
Styling Strategies and Recommendations
To create Visualforce pages that match the Lightning Experience visual design, create new pages using the Lightning Design System. There are a couple of ways to use the Lightning Design System in your
Visualforce pages.
Before we get to specifics, let’s think at a higher level and consider the different strategies for applying
Lightning Experience styling to your pages. In particular, let’s talk about your existing pages.
There are two ways to affect the styling of existing pages to make them look more like Lightning Experience.
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Chapter 34 Understanding Important Visual Design Considerations
•
Change the markup to apply new styling—make changes in your pages.
•
Change the styling rules for existing markup—make changes in your stylesheets.
These aren’t either / or. You can use them individually or in combination.
Correctly using the Lightning Design System means using the Lightning Design System stylesheets with all-new markup for your Visualforce pages. Again, this is the only supported method for matching the
Lightning Experience visual design.
To do this, you can either download the Lightning Design System stylesheets from their website and use them as you would any other stylesheet, or you can add the
<apex:slds>
component to the markup of your Visualforce page. The
<apex:slds>
component allows you to reference Lightning Design
System stylesheets without uploading them as a static resource, simplifying the syntax of your page and preventing you from hitting the 250-mb static resource limit.
Using
<apex:slds>
comes with its own set of guidelines and considerations. If you want to know more, work your way through the Lightning Design System badge or check out the link to the Visualforce
Developer Guide in the Resources section.
It’s also possible to add the Lightning Design System stylesheets, and revise your pages to use them. How much work this is depends on how closely you want to match Lightning Experience as well as the specific markup and components in your code. While it’s possible to achieve decent results this way, however, it’s not an approach we recommend. The Lightning Design System was designed to be applied to specific markup, and that’s simply not what Visualforce emits. There’s an “impedance mismatch” that, while not fatal, is definitely a serious rock in your shoe when you take this path.
Finally, there’s the other approach: adding new rules and styles to your existing (or a new) stylesheet to make your existing markup look more like Lightning Experience. If your page is already mostly styled with your own stylesheets, this approach might work well for you. If instead you’re mostly using the built-in
Visualforce components and the Salesforce Classic styling, it requires you to override the styles from the
Salesforce Classic stylesheet.
While this is technically possible, we want to discourage you from taking this approach. It introduces dependencies into your markup and styles that you don’t want to have. These dependencies are on the structure, IDs, and classes of the HTML rendered by the built-in Visualforce components. We want to be really clear here: the HTML rendered by the built-in Visualforce components is an internal implementation detail, subject to change without notice. If you have dependencies on it in your own stylesheets, your styling will eventually break.
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Chapter 34 Understanding Important Visual Design Considerations
The Salesforce Lightning Design System
The Lightning Design System is a design framework for building enterprise apps that look like Lightning
Experience. It includes a sophisticated CSS framework, a collection of graphic assets, and the Salesforce
Sans font. You can use the Lightning Design System to build pages and apps that look gorgeous and perfectly match the Lightning Experience user interface.
The Lightning Design System was designed to make it easy for customers and partners to match the
Lightning Experience look and feel. It also includes tools that make it possible to customize the look and feel to match your own brand—colors and so on—while still remaining consistent with overall Lightning
Experience design.
The Lightning Design System is so big and so exciting that…we’re not going to go into the details of using the Lightning Design System here. Because we’ve written a whole module about using it, Lightning Design
System . It explains how to get the Lightning Design System, the basic concepts of using it to design pages, and how to apply those concepts to building Lightning Experience apps with Visualforce.
Lightning Design System is a big module—you’ll have to work to earn that badge. While we do want to save the details for that module, we don’t want to leave you totally hanging here. So, let’s cover how you use the Lightning Design System with Visualforce in a general way.
The first thing to know is that the Lightning Design System assumes a new markup structure and styling classes. For this reason it’s best used with new pages and apps. It’s built around the capabilities of modern browsers, and takes advantage of the latest best practices for markup and styling. As much as we all love it, Visualforce has been around a while. Between the HTML it generates and static code in customer pages, most organizations will find it challenging to apply the Lightning Design System to existing pages.
The Lightning Design System module is focused on creating new pages and apps, and scoring that badge is the best way to learn about it. After finishing that module you’ll have an understanding of both how to use Lightning Design System and how to plan development around it.
287
CHAPTER 35 Knowing Which Features to Avoid in
Lightning Experience
In this chapter ...
•
•
•
<apex:relatedList> and Blacklisted
•
•
No, Really, Don’t Set window.location
•
•
There are a limited number of Visualforce components that we recommend you avoid on pages used in Lightning Experience. Additionally, a few features of Visualforce behave differently when used in Lightning
Experience. Finally, there are a few places in Lightning Experience where you can’t use Visualforce pages or apps, or where they might not function as expected.
Lightning Experience is still evolving and growing, and—Safe Harbor alert!—we hope to shrink this list as time goes on.
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Chapter 35 Knowing Which Features to Avoid in Lightning Experience
Lightning Experience Header and Navigation Menu
Can’t Be Suppressed
Visualforce pages always display with the standard Lightning Experience user interface when they run in
Lightning Experience. There’s no way to suppress or alter the Lightning Experience header or sidebar. In particular, the showHeader
and sidebar
attributes of
<apex:page >
have no effect on Visualforce pages when displayed in Lightning Experience.
This behavior is intentional. Apps that display in Lightning Experience are Lightning Experience apps. If you need to provide a completely custom interface for your app, you’ll need to run it in Salesforce Classic.
Salesforce Classic Header and Sidebar Are Always
Suppressed
The standard Salesforce Classic header and sidebar are always suppressed for pages when they’re displayed in Lightning Experience. In particular, the showHeader
and sidebar
attributes of
<apex:page > have no effect on Visualforce pages when displayed in Lightning Experience.
Pages behave as though the showHeader
and sidebar
attributes of
<apex:page >
are both set to false
.
Note: The standardStylesheets
attribute of
<apex:page >
, which determines whether to include or suppress the standard Salesforce Classic stylesheets, is unaffected by Lightning
Experience. That is, it defaults to true
in Lightning Experience, but you’re able to change it.
<apex:relatedList >
and Blacklisted Related Lists
There are a number of related lists that aren’t supported in Lightning Experience. These related lists are
“blacklisted,” which means they are explicitly prevented from being used. As you might expect, these same related lists are blacklisted in Visualforce with the
<apex:relatedList >
tag.
See “Data Access and Views: What’s Different or Not Available in Lightning Experience” in the online help for details of which related lists aren’t supported in Lightning Experience.
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Chapter 35 Knowing Which Features to Avoid in Lightning Experience
Avoid
<apex:iframe >
While it’s not impossible to use
<apex:iframe >
on a Visualforce page in Lightning Experience, we recommend avoiding it.
Visualforce pages are wrapped in their own iframe when displayed in Lightning Experience. As discussed at length in Exploring the Visualforce App Container , this has a number of significant implications for how the page behaves. Adding an additional level to the iframe stack increases the complexity of the environment.
If you really understand iframes and how they affect the DOM and JavaScript, you can manage this complexity. But unless you’ve already been working with nested iframes, it’s more likely that you’ll have difficult to debug problems. For this reason, we suggest you avoid this tag on pages that are used in
Lightning Experience.
No, Really, Don’t Set
window.location
Directly
We probably sound like a broken record at this point, but it’s important. If your page’s JavaScript code is setting the window.location
variable directly, that won’t work when the page is displayed in
Lightning Experience. You must modify this code for the page to work in Lightning Experience.
See the Managing Navigation unit for details.
sforce.one
Isn’t Salesforce Mobile-Only
The sforce.one
JavaScript utility object is available to Visualforce pages in both the Salesforce app and Lightning Experience. If you’ve been using the presence of the sforce.one
object as a way to tell if your page is running in a mobile or desktop context, you need to update your code.
Use one of the documented methods to distinguish between the Salesforce Classic, the Salesforce app, and Lightning Experience environments. Supported techniques are available in Visualforce, Apex, and
JavaScript.
For the full details, see the Sharing Visualforce Pages Between Classic and Lightning Experience unit.
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Chapter 35 Knowing Which Features to Avoid in Lightning Experience
Changes With Action Overrides
Perhaps the most significant change, in terms of things that might be hard to work around, Visualforce overrides of standard actions are slightly different in Lightning Experience compared to Salesforce Classic.
Any override for the object list action won’t be accessible in Lightning Experience.
Specifically, there are six standard actions you can override for an object in Salesforce Classic:
•
Object tab
•
Object list
•
Record view
•
Record edit
•
Record create
•
Record delete
In Lightning Experience the first two actions have been combined into one page, object home. Object home is similar to object list, with some elements of object tab, like recent items, added. Others, such as reports or tools, have moved to other parts of the user interface.
Regardless of the user interface settings in your organization, both object tab and object list are available to be overridden in Setup. Overriding the object tab action overrides the object home page in Lightning
Experience, as expected.
However, when in Lightning Experience, the object list action isn’t accessible in the user interface, so there’s no way to fire it. If your organization has overridden the object list action for any object, that functionality won’t be available when users are using Lightning Experience. If there are essential features in that override, you’ll need to find another way to make them available.
This table lists the standard actions you can override for an object in Setup, and the action that’s overridden in the three different user experiences.
Override in Setup
Tab
List
View
Edit
New
Delete
Salesforce Classic
object tab object list record view record edit record create record delete
Lightning Experience Salesforce App
object home
n/a
search object home record home record edit record create record delete record home record edit record create record delete
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Chapter 35 Knowing Which Features to Avoid in Lightning Experience
Note: “n/a” doesn’t mean you can’t access the standard behavior, and it doesn’t mean you can’t
override the standard behavior. It means you can’t access the override. It’s the override’s functionality that’s not available.
293
INDEX
A
Account Insights
Accounts
Actions in Lightning Experience
,
in the Global Actions menu
on list view items
on record pages
on related lists
on the Chatter page
on the Home page
Activity Timeline
Apex
App Launcher overview
App Manager overview
App Menu
AppExchange apps
Apps lightning
overview
Assistant
C
Calendar
Case feed
Cases
Chatter
Classic apps upgrade to Lightning apps
Compact layouts
,
Comparing the two interfaces
,
,
Considerations
Contacts
295
Creating Lightning Experience apps
Custom apps lightning
,
Custom buttons
JavaScript
,
migrate functionality to Lightning Experience
,
,
,
,
support in Lightning Experience
Custom help links
Custom objects
Custom URL buttons
Custom Visualforce buttons
Customization programmatic
Customizing
Customizing Lightning Experience
D
Duplicate management
E
Enabling by edition
Enabling Lightning Experience
Enabling users
Enhanced Notes
Evaluate your org’s readiness for Lightning
Experience
Events
F
Feed
G
Get your organization ready
Index
Global search
Global variables
$User.UITheme
$User.UIThemeDisplayed
H
Help menu
Highlights panel
Home
,
I
Is Lightning Experience right for me?
J
JavaScript custom buttons security issues
L
Lead conversion
Lead Workspace
Lightning actions
3rd-Party API Integration
populate fields based on user input
provide feedback messages to users
Lightning Apps create
navigation bar
overview
upgrade from Classic app
,
Lightning component actions
,
Lightning Experience
JavaScript custom button support
standard objects
Lightning Experience Developer Edition
Lightning Experience features chart
Lightning Experience overview
,
Lightning Experience Rollout Strategy
Lightning Experience Supported Editions
Lightning Experience Supported User Licenses
Lightning Setup page
Limitations
,
List views
,
List Views
N navigation create menu
Navigation menu
O
Object home
Object Manager
Opportunity home
Opportunity Kanban
Opportunity Workspace
,
Other enhancements
P
Page layouts how they work in Lightning Experience
Path
Performance chart
Permission sets
Piloting Lightning Experience to your users
Preview Lightning Experience
Q
Quick actions
R
Recommended features
Reports and Dashboards dashboard components
dashboard editor
feature comparison
interactive charts and filters
interactive dashboards
new home pages
296
Reports and Dashboards (continued) overview
report run page
Rolling out Lightning Experience assess your findings
communication plan
crafting a communication strategy
crafting a marketing strategy
create a Chatter group
creating a project schedule
creating a training plan
decide who to roll out to
define measures for success
deliver an executive summary
demo
educate your company
educating your company
,
Educating your company
educating yourself
,
,
employee survey
enabling Lightning Experience
engage with super users
engaging your super users
executive sponsor
,
gap analysis
,
go live
identifying stakeholders
Lightning Setup page
measure results
measuring results
overview
phased rollout
picking a launch date
planning your rollout
ready to start
revisiting your processes
risk severity matrix
rollout checklist
297
Rolling out Lightning Experience (continued) rollout strategy
rollout structure
super users
,
test your customizations
useful Trailhead modules
where to start
Rollout overview
S
Sales in Lightning Experience
Sales path
Sales Path
Salesforce Classic
Search
Setup
,
Shared Activities
Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads
Supported vs. unsupported features
Switcher
Switching between Lightning Experience and
Salesforce Classic
T
Tasks
Turn it on!
U
Understanding both user interfaces
Unsupported features
Upgrade Classic Apps overview
task
test
User profiles
Index
Index
V
Visualforce
,
,
,
,
,
W
What is Lightning Experience?
What’s new
298
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