Alex Colburn – June 7, 2021
The Developers Speak is a video series featuring certified Salesforce consultants at Digital Mass. They come to you twice a month to help bridge the gap between business problems and technical solutions.
Three times a year Salesforce does a massive release of new features and changes to the platform. This Friday and Saturday, June 11th and 12th, Salesforce will push all the new features and changes, and developers around the world will cheer with excitement. So today, the countdown begins.
To get ready, Andrew is kicking us off with a rundown of a very exciting new feature for admins - inline report editing! But that's not all - each day this week he will be back to give us an overview of another feature he's pumped about.
Hello everyone, Andrew Davis here. Senior Salesforce Developer at Digital Mass, and today, I want to talk to you guys about the Summer 21 release. That's right. One of my three favorite holidays in the calendar year. Salesforce is bringing some really great features to the table here this release with many more plans, some in beta, some in pilot, and many becoming generally available along. We're going to isolate the top five updates that we're most excited about here at Digital Mass and provide more information about them, for you, over the next five days.
First and foremost is an administrative feature that I particularly am incredibly excited about one that has been requested for years, and that is the in-line edit functionality for reports inside Salesforce. This is something that has been at the tip of the community's tongue for such a long time, and I'm really glad that they got to deliver it. This functionality does not replace but is a complement to, existing inline edit support in list views. Hopefully with some enhanced functionality and features that you may choose to want to take advantage of.
In particular, we don't have to deal with the concession of maintaining or filtering by a single record type when setting up a list view that supports inline editing, that was a major caveat to that functionality in the past. If you're an organization that uses the traditional Salesforce Sales Cloud, you've got opportunities, accounts, and contacts, it's very unlikely that you have just one record type for those objects. Reports will hopefully help us get around that by allowing you to create a custom filter that you define and still be able to provide those updates as needed a couple of caveats to the functionality, of course.
Picklists aren't supported in this inline edit functionality as of right now, date, time fields too, and encrypted text fields, or other kinds of examples, formula fields, of course, in those other sort of system, standardized fields created date, last modified date, things like that, obviously can't be edited, but you do really gain the benefit of not having to create custom list views for every record type, train your users on what to update and when causing them to have to filter between different views, and it also saves you from the pain of users exporting reports to CSV and then re-upload them, or provide them back to you. So this helps workaround a lot of the complications and maybe inefficiencies that you've had to deal with in the past while at the same time, giving your users the accelerated boost that they'd been wanting that they've been craving when it comes to just making mass updates to a relevant subset of records for them.
One additional note to make about reports is that it is technically generally available, but it is in beta state so you can get it in your production org. You'll just have to make a request for it through Salesforce support or just contact your AE. You can reach out to them and they'll make sure that you have the feature enabled in your org. And you can just click to enable that under your report settings and set up, and that's going to be it for the, for this first feature here inline editing and reporting. So exciting to see that coming in '21, it'll be hitting your sand or your production environment rather on June 11th and 12th of this year.
About the developer:
Meet Andrew Davis: Andrew joined the Digital Mass team as a Senior Salesforce Developer in August 2020. He came in with a few certifications on his belt and hasn't slowed down since. Andrew currently holds Platform Developer 1, Platform Developer 2, Certified Administrator, Platform App Builder, Marketing Cloud Email Specialist, Marketing Cloud Developer, and the Javascript Developer certifications.
Outside of work, Andrew likes to spend his time playing D&D, camping, and burying himself in Youtube playlists exploring things ranging from emerging technologies to how to hand-sew your own socks - it’s pretty obvious he fits right in with the DM crew!