Have you made the jump to Lightning yet? No, seriously, have you? It can sometimes be tough to separate the Salesforce spin from the cold, hard reality of what’s going on in real-world orgs – so it’s hard for us to have a true idea of how many of our readers will have made the leap.
If you haven’t – even after watching the frankly fabulous advice given to you at DF17 by this terrific trio – then this week’s blog might just be for you.
Because in this post we’re taking a look at a way to help you migrate your ‘classic’ JavaScript buttons to their modern Lightning-friendly alternatives.
So what’s the deal? Well, this month has seen the release of the Lightning Experience Configuration Converter, a new tool which can help to transport (some of) your dusty old JavaScript buttons into the modern world.
Here at Salesforce Weekly, we’re not in the business of blindly repeating Salesforce’s announcements and giving them unchallenged coverage, so rather than telling you what they say, here’s our take what we think you really need to know…
The Basics
The converter basically works as follows:
- Visit https://lightning-configuration.salesforce.com/
- Log in with your sandbox or Developer Edition creds (the tool allows you to make direct changes to your org, so it very sensibly will not let you log in with your production org creds – phew!)
- Run the tool to see which JavaScript buttons exist in your org and what Lightning-friendly alternatives they can be converted to (Lightning Components, Quick Actions, etc)
- Choose which buttons you want to convert, and watch as the magic happens automatically
One thing to bear in mind is that the converter creates the replacement for you, but it doesn’t touch the old JavaScript button. That’s very good news, since – even in a sandbox – you don’t really want those things disappearing until you’ve had time to test out the new alternative to prove it’s a like-for-like swap.
Oh and one other thing I really like about the converter is that you can calculate ‘user impact’ (a pretty grandiose way of saying that it’ll tell you how many times the button has ben used in the last month) before you make any changes, so that you know where to focus your attention. You have a button which no-one has used for the whole month? Have a think about whether you should really care about taking it with you into Lightning.
The Promise
So if you read the official announcements on this topic, here’s what you’re going to hear and what you’re going to see.
“OMG, it’s totally awesome! It literally [sic] magically helps you transform all your JavaScript buttons, and takes the hassle away so that you can instead spend your time dreaming up new ways to make your employees more productive in Lightning! Just take a look!” [insert mandatory GIF here, followed by at least one hashtag]
The Reality
OK, that last paragraph probably made me sound a little cynical. Heh, if the cap fits, I guess…
Anyway, I wanted to balance this post out with a flavour of what I found when I took the tool for a spin in one of my orgs. I’ll let the image do the talking to start with:
Yes, you’re reading that Conversion Type column correctly. In this particular example, the converter could help me convert, erm, precisely none of my JavaScript buttons.
Now, let’s cover the obvious caveats. Yes, your mileage may vary. This is probably an extreme example. But, hey, the image from the announcement was an extreme example too, just extreme in the opposite direction. And, yeah, it does make sense that JS buttons from a managed package wouldn’t be upgradeable through this means (it’s up to the ISV to do that). But some of those are what I’d consider to be ‘real’ JavaScript buttons. And no dice, seemingly on some technicality. Oh, yeah, we can convert JavaScript buttons… but not that kind of JavaScript button. Sigh.
The Balanced, Considered Conclusion from a Totally Unbiased Professional (Ha!)
As you can see, this tool may not be the silver bullet which will solve all your JavaScript migration headaches at once. But, in fairness, it will help you get the easy stuff done even more easily (if your org has any of this easy stuff to do) so that you can concentrate your efforts on the more involved elements of the migration.
And I’m sure that if I’d chosen a different, less totally-funked-up, org to experiment with, then I’d have got some success.
So, is this tool worthy of the time spent to take a quick look and see if it can help you out? Absolutely. It’s quick, it’s easy, and – most beautifully of all – it’s free. So take it for a spin and see how Lightning-ready your org is after the converter has worked its magic.
Oh and finally, there’s more of this kind of stuff coming out at the moment too. Check out this Quip document for info on the new Lightning Experience Transition Toolkit, with some other useful features to help you move to Lightning if you haven’t already done so. Which – if you’ve made it all the way to the bottom of this article – I’m guessing you haven’t, have you?