Compact Layouts, De-Mystified

We've been studying for our Platform App Builder Transition Exam, and one of the topics listed in the study guide (and in SalesforceBen's helpful post) is Compact Layouts.

In short, according to the Salesforce Help site, "Compact Layouts are used in SF1 and Lightning to display a record's key fields at a glance."

We were already familiar with these to some degree, as we actively use them in our own Salesforce org:

 
opp name, stage, close date, amount

opp name, stage, close date, amount

 

...but in studying further and trying to learn all the details, we got a little confused! Now that we're un-confused, we are here to share our newfound knowledge.

We read the documentation (about 47 times) and noticed something strange, so we asked The Internet:

All the documentation talks about adding 10 fields to the Compact Layout, but all the explanations of how they get used seemed to only talk about fields 1 through 5.

Turns out we kept missing a key line in all of those help materials, which The Internet helpfully pointed out for us:

Right there in the "overview" lesson (and in the release notes), it says "In the full Salesforce site, compact layouts determine which fields appear in the Chatter feed item that appears after a user creates a record with a publisher action."  

We're still not sure how we missed that sentence every time we came back to this page! We think it's because the "definition" of these layouts is always described as being about mobile and Lightning, so we weren't expecting the fact that they get used in SF Classic as well; also, we started learning about these from the SF1 Mobile lesson in Trailhead, which doesn't talk about their application in SF classic for obvious reasons.

We tested this and sure enough, it's true:

4 fields...

4 fields...

 
...more than 4 fields! (though you still need to click "more" to see all of these)

...more than 4 fields! (though you still need to click "more" to see all of these)

So! There's the answer to why compact layouts support up to 10 fields!

If you're not using them yet, you totally should! It's the closest thing we have right now to this popular Idea in that it allows you to bring certain fields to the top of a record in SF1 that might not need to be at the top in SF Classic. For example, our Opportunity page layout are huge, and organized into sections that make sense and are helpful when you're using a browser on the desktop, but there are important fields scattered all over the page that we can pull together into a compact layout so they're still visible at a glance on our phones.

7 Things I Learned in Trailhead (so far!)

(this is a post from Michelle about stuff she's been doing mostly without Alli!)

If you're reading this blog you've probably heard of Trailhead, the new interactive learning platform from Salesforce. I've been working my way through the various trails and modules over the past 10 months (39 badges earned as of this writing!), and as I go, I've kept track of some of the specific "aha" moments I've had -- tiny bits of new knowledge that have come up in the middle of an otherwise-familiar subject. (Certainly there have also been big new things I've learned, like everything about Lightning, but this post is just about those little unexpected moments.)

Password Lockout Messages

You can customize certain messages that appear when users reset their passwords, or when they're locked out from Salesforce entirely. The "Message" and "Help Link" sections of this article describe how this works.

 
probably this isn't the message you'd actually use

probably this isn't the message you'd actually use

 

Roles as a List View

I had no idea that it was possible to view the Roles page as anything other than the "tree" view -- which is a good way to look at the hierarchy if you actually have a lot of roles and you need to see the relationship between them, but if your Roles setup is simple and you're trying to make sure than everyone has one, the "list view" option is way easier to navigate.

 
list>  tree

list>  tree

 

Schema Builder!

There are three amazing things about Schema Builder that I didn't know because I never really looked at it closely again after it was released! (I use it all the time, but I knew the basics and apparently never… opened my eyes? again? after a while?)

1) You can toggle between displaying object and field labels vs their names.

 
so many custom objects

so many custom objects

 

 

2) You can use the "Select From" dropdown to filter the list of objects that are displayed in the sidebar. Try picking "Selected Objects" and you'll get a list of just the things you've already put on the screen.

 
so convenient

so convenient

 

3) If you've ever added objects to the layout and then spent the next three minutes chasing them around the screen and dragging them into place… try clicking "Auto-Layout button instead next time.

Chatter Auto-Following

I would love for everyone in the universe (and PatronManager clients in particular) to use Chatter much more than they currently do. I thought this fact was interesting for small organizations as a built-in way to jumpstart Chatter adoption:

"When you turn on Chatter for your company ...if your company has less than 16 Chatter users, all users automatically follow each other and up to 25 most recently used records."

Hilarity

The whole Trailhead team has a GREAT sense of humor. My personal favorite joke appears in the Event Monitoring module:

Let’s consider one of the example cases from earlier. A sales representative named Rob Burgle left your company a few weeks ago and joined a major competitor. All of a sudden, you start losing deals to this other company. You suspect that Mr. Burgle downloaded a report containing confidential lead information and shared it with his new employer.