Salesforce Spring '24 Release - Customization, App Builder & Development Top Features

Spring '24 release is round the corner. Below is my top pick from App Builder & Development perspective: -

Add Fields from Related Objects to Dynamic Forms-Enabled Pages

Drill into lookup relationship fields from the component palette in the Lightning App Builder and access fields from related objects. To display relevant data from related objects, drag the cross-object fields onto your record page.

How: We made some small enhancements to the Lightning App Builder UI to help you navigate through relationship fields.

On the Fields tab, a breadcrumb at the top shows the spans that you drilled into. The top-level breadcrumb indicates the object that the page is associated with.

Cross-object relationship fields have an arrow icon (>). You can drag them onto the page as is, or click the arrow icon to drill in.

When you select a cross-object field on the canvas, a new Object property shows the relationship of the field to the base object associated with the Lightning page.

You can drill down two levels. Polymorphic relationship fields—where the related object can be one of several different types of objects—aren’t supported as cross-object fields in Lightning App Builder.

Use Dynamic Actions with Standard Objects on Mobile

Give users more personalized experiences on record pages by using dynamic actions for standard objects on mobile devices. Assign actions in the Lightning App Builder instead of the page layout, and apply filters to control when and where actions appear for users. Set filters based on user fields, form factors, and other criteria.

Get Notified Before Deleting Permission Sets Assigned to Users

If you try to delete a permission set included in a permission set group that’s assigned to users, you now receive an error. You can only delete a permission set that isn’t assigned to users either directly or through a permission set group. Previously, this action wasn’t blocked, which allowed users to be assigned to empty permission set groups without enabled permissions.

Use Permission Set Groups in All Editions

To help you better manage your users’ permissions, permission set groups are available in all editions.

Ant Migration Tool End of Life

The Ant Migration Tool is retired with Spring ’24. The tool continues to function for future API versions but isn’t updated with new functionality and isn’t supported. To manage metadata changes, switch to Salesforce CLI for a modern, supported developer experience.

Handle Callbacks Asynchronously in Apex

If your OpenAPI specification includes a valid callback operation, External Services generates a typesafe Apex class with callback interfaces. Create an Apex client capable of handling an asynchronous callout by using the Apex callback interface. The Apex client waits for a delayed response from an external system for up to a year or beyond. To monitor status and system messages, use the Background Operations app or the Apex Debug log. Previously, you could call out to External Services only synchronously, where the callout waits for an HTTP response for up to two minutes and then times out.

Search for Records with the Lightning Record Picker Component (Generally Available)

Use the lightning-record-picker component in a Salesforce application so that desktop and mobile users can quickly find and select Salesforce records. Configure the component’s behavior and presentation, and enable filtering so that users can retrieve and display precisely the records that they want. This feature, now generally available, includes some changes since the last release. You can now retrieve up to 100 records. Previously, it was 50 records. The component also displays clear error messages when you configure invalid specifications and supports new attributes. This component uses the GraphQL wire adapter, which enables offline use.

How: Here’s an example to get started with the lightning-record-picker component. The component attributes provide the label for the input field, the object to search, and a callback to handle the selection of a record.

<lightning-record-picker
    label="Select a record"
    placeholder="Search..."
    object-api-name="Contact"
    value={initialValue}
    onchange={handleChange}
></lightning-record-picker>        

Here’s what the example looks like in the UI.

Providing a record ID to the value attribute makes the record picker component display a default selected record.

lightning-input

This attribute is new.

? role—Creates an accessible combobox using lightning-input instead of the lightning-combobox component or a custom component. Set role="combobox" and type="text" to create a combo box. The only valid value for role is combobox.

Complete release notes can be found here.