Quick Tips for improving your Salesforce Experience

Here at makepositive we’ve always championed a culture of knowledge sharing. Fostering a community of exceptional consultants who love learning new skills and passing this knowledge on within the Salesforce ecosystem. Our quick tips blog feature is no different. Within this week’s post, we look to share our knowledge of Inline editing on Reports, UI Images and Custom Permissions.

For our previous top tips blog post we covered topics such as keyboard shortcuts, formula commenting and consistent page layouts. If you missed it, please visit the following link.

Sarah Neville tells us about Inline Editing on Reports:

Users can now update fields from a report using inline editing. This feature (still in beta) was a part of the Summer 21 release and it allows users to keep records up to date without the need to navigate away from the report to the record page itself – saving time and clicks and means the user won’t lose where they were in the report. In addition, as part of the upcoming Spring ‘22 release, Salesforce will make editing multiple rows and columns from multiple records at the same time available within the report run page, which is certainly a super time-saving feature.

So how can you do this?

Inline Editing in Reports can be enabled by navigating to Setup > Reports and Dashboards Settings and then selecting ‘Enable Inline Editing in Reports (Lightning Experience only)’ and clicking Save.

Once enabled, hover over the field that you want to edit on a report, click on the pencil icon, update the value and click save. This will update the value on the report, the source record and the report will rerun automatically. Note, if you see a lock icon instead of a pencil, the field is not editable.

Fields and field types that are not available for inline editing are:

Task and event object fields
System fields such as Record ID and Created Date
Compound fields, including name and address fields
Encrypted text fields
Formula fields
Standard fields of type date/time, auto number, roll-up summary, record type, master-detail, long text area, rich text, or hierarchy
Other fields where editing isn’t permitted due to restrictions in the page layout or record type

Available from Winter 22:

Picklists
Custom date/time fields
Lookup fields (excludes Owner fields)

Greg Burke talks about UI Images:

When looking to get some added interest from your user base, evaluate the client to see if they will be open to the idea of making the page a bit more interesting. Clients in the past have reacted very well to the simple addition/use of an emoji symbol instead of just outputting text, or adding a big red stop sign to the top of the page when the accounts status is blocked etc. It draws the eye in and ensures that the chances of glossing over another text field in the layout is minimised.

If you want to add an image to your page, the first thing you need to do is to add your images to the “Static Resources” in setup.

Once these are uploaded, you create yourself a new Formula on the target Object, give it a name and the formula return type of “Text” in the formula editor screen (I prefer the Advanced Formula tab). Start your criteria for displaying the images (either an IF or CASE statement seems to work best for this) e.g.

IF(ISPICKVAL(Active__c, “Yes”), IMAGE(“/resource/1632135677000/Active?”, “Active”), IMAGE(“/resource/1632135459000/Inactive”, “Inactive”) )

In order to get the URL after “IMAGE” you click the static resource you uploaded, then click “view file” and copy the URL, removing the salesforce instance reference.

This formula can then be added to the page layout, in the main body, related lists, mini page layouts, list views etc. to show which accounts are active or inactive (see below):

Louise French discusses Custom Permissions:

These are a really neat way to control who can do what without hardcoding Profile names.

Take for example a Validation Rule that should allow a bunch of different Profiles to do something but not other users, traditionally we would write this out like this:

AND(

NOT( $Profile.Name = ‘System Administrator’),

NOT( $Profile.Name = ‘Office Agent’),

NOT( $Profile.Name = ‘Team Leader’),

ISPICKVAL(Discount_Type__c, ‘Goodwill’))

This is technically correct but because we’re hardcoding the Profile names it means that it needs to be updated each time a new Profile needs access to this functionality. If someone needs access to this functionality and can’t be given one of the existing Profiles a whole new Profile is required!

By creating a Custom Permission and assigning it to the profiles in question we can write the Validation Rule like this:

AND(

NOT($Permission.AllowQuoteGoodwill),

ISPICKVAL(Discount_Type__c, ‘Goodwill’))

This is simpler, will require less maintenance and also means that we can utilise Permission Sets if individual users need access to bypass this Validation Rule in the future. Custom Permissions can be used in all sorts of scenarios, I like to use them on Lightning Pages to control visibility and they can also be accessed in Flows which is a neat way to route users and customise the behaviour of a Screen Flow.

We hope these tips give you the foundations and knowledge to explore new and useful functionality within Salesforce. Please let us know how you get on and feel free to share any of your top tips in the comments as after all we’re all about knowledge sharing at makepositive.

Stay tuned for more top tips from our fantastic consultants in the coming weeks. 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 on our website.

Author: Tom Phillis, Sarah Neville, Greg Burke, Louise French

Quick Tips for improving your Salesforce Experience – Part 5