Makepositive | Tips on improving Salesforce experience

Here at makepositive, we have been sharing some of our top Salesforce tips to help our followers up-skill and benefit from the knowledge of our fantastic makepositive team. Our last post covered a reminder about an often forgotten feature; using Lookup relationships to get additional data on report types, a review of the Audit History Trail to monitor config changes and some quick tips on using SOQL to query data in Developer Console. If you missed our last post you can access it here.

This third instalment covers one of the most exciting new features from Salesforce – Dynamic Forms, using report URL parameters in buttons and some useful chrome extensions.

Will Taylor talks us through Dynamic Forms:

Will Taylor has been getting some great feedback from his client around his use of Dynamic Forms! This game-changing feature has given us the ability to have a single page layout per object. No longer do we need to maintain multiple page layouts, using visibility rules we can control exactly which fields show and in which situations. Now, there is a big limitation to be aware of, which is that it’s only available on custom objects.

Sarah Neville shares a useful trick with Report URLs:

Did you know that you can pass URL parameters to set filter values for reports in Lightning? The filters can also be dynamic such as an account ID. This means you can embed the URL within a button or a link on a record page and a different version of the report will run depending on which record you access the URL from.

An example use case could be to allow sales users to run an opportunity report for a specific account at the click of a button. Although, you can achieve the same outcome by embedding a report chart onto a lightning page, using URLs in buttons/links can be used as an alternative solution where you may want to use up less space on the page than a report chart. Here are the steps:

Create your report and add the filter(s) you want to include as parameter(s) in your URL. Leave the filter value blank, e.g. Account ID equals “”
Save and Run your report
Copy the report URL (to avoid hard-coding IDs/URLs use custom metadata types to hold and replace the report ID and change to relative URL)
Create a new Button on the object you want to add the report URL to, in this example the Account object.
Paste the URL and append the parameter &fv0=Filter Value to the end of the URL. Here is the structure for the URL filter parameters:

& — Denotes a new parameter in the URL. If no other parameters are present in the URL, then substitute? in place of &.
fv0 — The fv stands for “filter value,” and is the name of the parameter. The 0 is the numerical order in which the filter appears in the report. (The first filter is 0, the second filter is 1, the third is 2, and so forth.) Standard filters don’t count in this order, and can’t be filtered using URL parameter
Filter Value — The criteria that the filter operates on. The filter value must be URI encoded, which means certain characters (such as spaces) must be written in a format that URLs can understand. A space (‘ ‘) becomes %20 when URI encoded.

In this example, we would add ?fv0={!Account.Id} to the end of the URL

Save your button and add it to the page layout
And voila! When you click on the button on an Account record, your report will run with a filter automatically applied for the Account record you are on

Read more about filtering reports via URL parameters here. In the Spring 21 release, Salesforce added the ability to use filter URL parameters for dashboards too. However, you need to add each of the potential filter values on the dashboard – you can’t leave the filter values blank as you can do with a report. I.e. to use the filter ?fv0={!Account.Id}, all potential Account IDs would need to be added as filter values on the dashboard. This, therefore, doesn’t work so well for filtering by record ID but there will be other use cases where filtering by fields, such as Stage, can still come in handy! Read more about filtering dashboards via URL parameters here.

Greg Burke’s favourite Chrome Extensions:

Greg has what he considers a couple of pretty essential plugins for chrome. The first one is Show API Name toggle – when you’re in an org that has inconsistent naming conventions (2 fields labelled product, or a standard account lookup and a custom with filters etc.) you can toggle the API names to appear below the label, allowing you to quickly know which field needs editing or what is being shown in the page layout!

Second is Greg’s most used plugin, ORGanizer for Salesforce. Greg recommends a couple of minor tweaks once it’s installed by going into the options, and turning off the “ORGanizer Button” as well as the “Quicklogin (standard Salesforce login page)” as he finds both a little frustrating (plus the second option involves storing Salesforce logins in an area where the security is unknown).

Some of the more useful aspects are the ability to colour and name your different instances, so you always know which environment you are working in. There is also a quick launch shortcut where you can access areas of setup by typing into the box much in the same way as apple spotlight works, but for salesforce back end only. Lastly, there is also a login as option where an admin can use a keyboard shortcut to login as another user (default is Ctrl + Shift + 8).

We hope these tips have helped you explore more functionality within Salesforce. Please feel free to share any of your own top tips in the comments as makepositive strives to build a stronger Salesforce community.

Stay tuned for more of the team’s top tips! If you would like to speak to one of makepositive’s Salesforce experts about how you can improve your Salesforce experience please reach out to us at [email protected] or complete the Contact Form below.

Author: Louise French, Will Taylor, Sarah Neville & Greg Burke

Quick Tips for improving your Salesforce Experience – Part 3