The Summer Salesforce release is once again upon us, sporting this time a seasonal Seagulls release logo. As someone who lives by the sea I’m no fan of the noisy gull – so this logo isn’t a favourite, I’d have voted for the Sunscreen release logo option personally. That said, the logo animation within Lightning Experience does work well.
Quick fun fact – there is actually no such bird type or species as the seagull or sea-gull – the correct term is gull. Our friends in the sunglasses are probably common gulls. Anyway I digress.
This post briefly outlines selected highlights related to the Force.com platform (in no order of significance).
The new release is generally available now for pre-release preview.
The release notes are available online here.
– features are GA if not indicated otherwise
Visual Workflow – Field Rules (Pilot)
Field Rules enable conditions to be defined for a given UI input that control the setting of visible, hidden, required or optional attributes. Enabling the UI composition and interactions to be data-driven allows guided journeys to be implemented in Flow with better user experience characteristics than was previously possible. Flows are a great tool for developing custom UI in Salesforce and can remove the requirement to develop complex Lightning Component based interactions in LEX. There are additional capabilities in the Summer release for launching/embedding Flows within Lightning Pages (screenshot below shows the Flow component). It seems clear that extending the capabilities of Flow is seen as mitigation for the complexity/time/resource challenges of Lightning Components over Visualforce.
Einstein Vision
Einstein Vision is a REST API that offers image recognition capabilities such as visual search, brand detection and object identification via custom or pre-trained classifiers. An Einstein Platform Account is required to access the API (signup here), which offers 1,000 free predictions per month. Full detail of the API can be found at https://metamind.readme.io.
Einstein Data Discovery for Salesforce Wave Analytics
Einstein Data Discovery performs automated analysis of an ingested dataset to provide natural language answers, explanations and recommendations leading to predictive actionable insights. The tool enables automated, unbiased analysis of scenario patterns as below.
What happened?
Why did it happen?
What will happen?
What should I do about it?
Results and recommendations can be exported to Wave Analytics or a Salesforce object for reporting purposes. Further detail is provided in this datasheet.
Deploy and Retrieve Metadata via Apex
A new Metadata namespace enables metadata manipulation directly from Apex script. This release is limited to Custom Metadata Type records and page layout metadata types which reflects a focus on use cases around development of custom configuration UI. Hopefully this is just a starting point and consistency with the Metadata API will ultimately be achieved.
Advanced PDF Rendering (Pilot)
Advanced PDF rendering provides support for the CSS Paged Media specification which adds functionality for pagination, margins, page size and orientation, headers and footers and image orientation. To configure a Visualforce page for advanced rendering the attribute setting renderAs=”advanced_pdf” is required. Visualforce is not an ideal solution for document generation, it is nonetheless a popular approach – so improvements to the layout handling will be widely appreciated.
Subscribe Other People to Reports (LEX-only)
Reporting Subscriptions were previously configured by the end-User on a one-to-one basis. In my view this implementation approach limited the use of this capability in addressing requirements for proactive notification. In the Summer ’17 release one user can configure a report subscription for multiple users – as shown below.
Lightning Console JavaScript API (Pilot)
Programmatically control Tabs, Subtabs and the Utility Bar in the Lightning Console from JavaScript within Lightning Component controller code. This API is the direct equivalent of the Console Integration Toolkit for the Classic Console.
Omni-Channel in Lighting Experience (Beta)
Omni-Channel support has been added to the Lightning Console to allow Agents to accept/reject routed Work Items and to set their Presence Status. The Omni-Channel Supervisor view is not yet supported which is unfortunate given how much functionality this relatively new feature adds. Live Agent Chat and SOS routing is not supported as the underlying features are not yet Lightning ready. Active time tracking is also absent in this release.
Omni-Channel External Routing (Beta)
There is little information available on this one, however it appears that Queues can be configured for either standard Omni-Channel routing or to delegate routing to an external source via API. This could be incredibly powerful where routing decisions rely on off-platform data or cross system boundaries.
UI API (Developer Preview)
The previously named Lightning UI has been renamed to the UI API, which makes sense. This API provides UI centric, composite responses intended for the efficient composition of UI.