Summer holidays have arrived now, but who noticed? The days have blended into weeks and the weeks into months. And now Summer Holidays feels much like the last 6 months… How mad is that?
Nobody can blame you for feeling this way, so here we’re to brighten up your Summer and offer a slice of normality – a brand new Salesforce release and this one is difficult to simply go unnoticed.
This time precision focused post, no messing only the things which have the potential to change the world (well your Salesforce world), but who knows…
After the introduction of “Component Visibility” we started to see the big picture and power of the Lightning App Builder, the ability to show/hide components on Lightning Pages was a turning point for driving adoption with the Lightning Platform. It meant functionality could be surfaced for the business when needed.
Dynamic forms extends this component visibility functionality to a field-level – now the bigger picture and story here is this – remember “Page Layouts” you know the thing they shoehorned into Lightning. Well this is the start of transitioning away from that.
If you can organise fields on forms – the “Page Layout” fades away…
As well as this, there’s a ton of benefits and opportunities here beyond the obvious administration & simplification of layouts to less-is-more and only show what you need, when you need it.
Don’t get too excited yet, this is Preview Non-GA only and limited to Custom Objects. Closing note, I just hope “FlexiPages” doesn’t become the new “Profile” for those who have been scared by metadata deployments!
As well as optimising my development experience in VSCode, I’ve been getting down with Second-Generation Packaging and Unlocked Packages. It’s fair to say this transition is hard and not accessible for large majority of Salesforce community. I’ve managed to get going on a couple of greenfield projects, but the resistant to mainstream adoption is how to do that with a complex and mature org.
Say hello to “Org Dependent Packaging”
One of the challenges is untangling the happy soap, when you have loads of customisations and some big mainstream apps like Financialforce, CPQ or Not-for-profit Success Pack floating in your Org. There is no single or yet perfect strategy for this; only don’t give up. It’s the future.
Let’s say you have some developers writing some Apex or creating Flows – now everything has a dependency on something no matter how clever you are. With Org-Dependent Packages, you are now able to make the package dependent on Org metadata rather than another or multiple packages – how cool is that?
Let’s say you have built a new Onboarding process using Flow – now this solution needs access to a handful of standard and custom objects to operate. With Org Dependent packages, you can now make the set of changes dependent on the Org metadata; therefore you don’t need to include the additional metadata. This is game changer and different to standard Unlocked Packages where you would need to include the metadata or have adopted a wider packaging strategy with an understanding of the dependencies.
As good as this is, you must still think beyond simply just creating Unlocked Packages as and when, you may have untangled your happy soap, but you org is now stacked higher than an “Amazon depot” with Packages.
“Use this feature at your sole discretion”
Unlocked Packaging will be featuring in future posts and on our YouTube channel – stay tuned!
Now that makes two; surely we can add something more making a trio of must check out features with this year’s Summer’s release. Of course it would be obscene not to mention Flow and we don’t want people on our case for not!
After the initial buzz of Process Builder and Flow, many annoyances and frustrations started creeping in. UI not playing ball, bulkification, issues with deployments to name a few… But the last 12 month Flow has really started to expand, becoming more friendly and lot less frustrating.
Summer brings in some significant improvements for Flow
Previously it was massively annoying paging through pages of Process Builders (Flows under the hood), add to this confusion about where to start.
Create Flows with the Enhanced New Flow Window and Start Element
Very soon, the only starting place you will need to know will be this one.
Trigger a Flow to Run When a Platform Event Message Is Received
Along similar lines subscribing to Platform Events previously involved Process Builder, now as everything shifts to the new Flow starting place – you can now build out Flow Subscribers directly within Flow. Yay!
Configure Loop Elements Without Creating Loop Variables
One of the reasons Flows got so quickly inflated was when you need to do something which involved multiple records you need to loop over each record in the collection, the initial setup and organisation of this involved creatING bunch of variable to orchestrate and this is where Flow gets frustrating as you suddenly have lots of variables. With the best will in the world – most people don’t follow the best naming convention thus debugging is difficult – a lot less flows variables is only a good thing!
There is your three things worth checking out in our opinion, and three flow features as the number three and that concludes what can only be described as a Summer of Madness!
Take Care, Stay Safe – from all of us at Salesforce Weekly!