The author, Neeraj Soni, is Solutions Consultant – Salesforce Practice at Extentia.
How many of us have wished that Salesforce layouts were more flexible? I know I have. And guess what? <drum roll> Wish granted. In the all-new, just-released, Winter ’21 Release of Salesforce.
There have been countless times when we’ve had to develop a Visualforce page because a customer needed a field to be shown dynamically, or, we’ve created multiple record types and page layouts such that updates and maintenance became painstakingly-time consuming. Been there? Done that?
I recall I once had 21 record types and equivalent number of page layouts for an Account object on one of my customer’s orgs! We reduced the number of record types and page layouts by performing an optimization exercise - a story I will keep for another time. Suffice to say, that was not AT ALL an efficient way to handle record types.
Which is precisely why Dynamic Forms is one of my favorite features rolled out by Salesforce in the Winter ’21 release. Dynamic Forms not only gives us flexibility with field visibility based on different criteria, but by utilizing some Salesforce best practices, allow us to reduce the page load time and improve performance. Dynamic Forms, for now, are only available for custom objects. But I am hopeful Salesforce will roll out this feature for standard objects as well.
Benefits of Dynamic Forms
Before we dive into the details, let’s look at the advantages of using Dynamic Forms:
Place fields anywhere on the field section without adding them to the page layout
Control visibility of fields and sections based on the criteria you choose
Reduce management of multiple complex page layouts
Improve page load time and overall page performance
Here’s a Quick-Guide to Working with Dynamic Forms
Open a Lightning Record Page in edit mode in the Lightning App Builder. Select the Record Detail section. This will bring up the option for you to upgrade to Dynamic Forms.
Hit the upgrade button, this will take you to the wizard screen. Here you can select the layout that you would want the fields and sections to be migrated to the Dynamic Form.
This brings up to first 100 fields and up to the first 100 sections in each region to help you quickly migrate to Dynamic Forms using an existing layout. Optionally, you may choose whether you want to migrate the fields and sections in the Accordion component. Select the page layout,hit Finish and you are done upgrading your Lightning page to Dynamic Form.
Notice that you can now work on each component on the Details section independently.
You may now add or remove section and fields on the Lightning page from Fields tab.
You may control the number of columns for the section.
Field behavior can be selected from Read-Only or Required.
You may also set the criteria for component visibility by adding a visibility filter. The sections or fields on the form can be shown based on multiple criteria like field value on the record, profile of the logged in user, or custom permission.
Use Cases
A few examples for using Dynamic Forms are as follows:
Show only relevant sections and fields based on an Opportunity stage.
Show fields to only authorized users.
Pro Tips
Use Accordions and Tabs for improved load speed and performance.
Add Record Detail – Mobile component to pages so mobile users see the Details fields.
You may use Page Layout and Dynamic Forms in Conjunction with each other.
What’s Not Supported, Yet
Dynamic Forms is currently only available for custom objects; standard objects such as Accounts and Opportunities are not supported.
Dynamic Forms are not supported on record pages that use pinned region or custom page templates (only for console app).
The new Field Section and Field components are not supported on mobile.
Traditional page layouts will still control related lists e.g. order of related lists and visible columns on related lists.
Some field types are not supported in the Field Visibility filter.
Extentia’s Salesforce Team have already begun to experiment with different possibilities for each new feature and we're very impressed with the updates, improvements and modifications, we've seen so far. We're excited about leveraging these new features and are looking forward to using Dynamic Forms and other new functionality of the Winter '21 Release.
We're confident the Winter ‘21 Release will bring tremendous benefit to the implementations we carry out for our customers, along with our partners at *fivestar. If you have a question on how you can get your hands on the new features of the Winter ’21 Release, how to switch on and maximize Dynamic Forms or any other functionality, or would like more information on how these upgrades will benefit your organization, write in to us. We’d love to chat.
Read other Extentia Blog posts here!