Post 5 – Customizing Salesforce with Lightning Aura Components Series

This will be the last of a series of posts I will be doing over the next few weeks. This particular post will cover working with the new Salesforce Mobile App. The series will all lead up to the introduction of my new course titled, “Customizing Salesforce with Lightning Aura Components” from Pluralsight. This course is a total re-write of my most popular course, “Customizing Salesforce with Lightning Components: Getting Started“, which was released back in early 2017. It will focus on using the new modern toolset that Salesforce offers as part of Salesforce DX.

Working with Salesforce Mobile

Salesforce introduced their mobile app called Salesforce1 in 2014. In November 2019, Salesforce introduced a new mobile app that closely mirrors the Lightning Experience on the Desktop. To understand how far the app has come, I think you need some images:

Right away you should have noticed that the details view includes more fields and this is primarily because of the denser view with labels to the left and less space between fields. This was a feature introduced for Lightning Experience to improve usability.

There are other big features like:

1. Favoriting and Search icon links in the top menu bar
2. There is also a really cool download icon that allows authorized users to send links to other authorized users.
3. And the menu navigation has changed quite a bit and now mirrors what is found in Lightning Experience

There are also some Lightning App Builder improvements that let you preview pages better and use filters to set component visibility.

Using the Salesforce Mobile App QuickStart Page

There will be some steps Salesforce Administrators/Developers will need to take to support the transition to the new Salesforce Mobile App. To assist with that process, Salesforce has provided a new link in Setup called, New Salesforce Mobile App Quickstart.

The QuickStart includes a section called “Enable Your Customizations for Mobile” and in it is the following:

• Run the Salesforce Optimizer for Mobile Lightning Pages Report (Beta) – Mostly includes recommendations for how you can fine-tune pages/apps for mobile. Once generated, a copy will be available in Files.
• Update Your Lightning Apps for Mobile – Adds the phone form factor to apps. You can also do this manually through App Manager.
• Update Your Pages for Mobile – Adds the phone form factor to desktop-assigned pages. You can also do this manually though Lightning App Builder.

Wrapping up the Course

The key points I hope you take away from the course are:

• Don’t be afraid to embrace Aura components, even if you are a junior developer, a Salesforce Admin or a developer that has only worked with Visualforce. Simple Aura components are not difficult and can really improve the Lightning Experience for your customers.
• Embrace the new modern tools that Salesforce offers and which this course goes over in depth. Even though you can create Aura components just using Developer Console, I strongly recommend that you embrace the modern toolset and Visual Studio Code. This will also help you to transition to creating Lightning Web Components, which can only be created with these tools.
• When using Apex, always consider security since CRUD and FLS security is not automatically enforced.
• However, if you can utilize the Base Lightning Components that do not use Apex, consider using them. It means you will not have to write Apex or Apex Unit tests, or worry about security.
• Always consider the Usability of your components by using the Design Resources and making the components as flexible as possible.
• Keep learning and pass what you learn onto others in the Salesforce community.

All of the code shown in the course, can be accessed through the following GitHub repo.

And if you are interested in going deeper with Aura components, check out my other intermediate Pluralsight course about Lightning Component Best Practices.

The course should be released soon. Tune in here for an announcement.

Thank you, Sara