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Considerations for Universally Required Fields

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Considerations for Universally Required Fields

A universally required field is a custom field. It must have a value whenever a record is saved within Salesforce, the Lightning Platform API, Connect Offline, Salesforce for Outlook, the Self-Service portal, or automated processes such as Web-to-Lead and Web-to-Case. Review the following considerations before making your custom fields universally required.

Required Editions

Available in: both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience

Available in: Contact Manager, Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, Developer, and Database.com Editions

Standard Objects, Page Layouts, Connect Offline, Salesforce for Outlook, the Self-Service portal, Web-to-Lead, and Web-to-Cases are not available in Database.com
  • Standard fields cannot be universally required.
  • Universally required fields are required across all record types.
  • Edit pages always display universally required fields, regardless of field-level security.
  • When designing your page layouts, universally required fields:
    • Cannot be removed from a page layout
    • Are automatically added to the end of the first section of a page layout if not already on it
    • Cannot be read only or optional
    • Display in bold, indicating they are always visible
    • Are disabled on the field properties page because you cannot remove the required setting
  • Universally required fields are only enforced during lead conversion if validation and triggers for lead conversion are enabled in your organization.
  • Quick Create does not enforce universally required fields.
  • If you make an activity custom field universally required, you must also provide a default value.
  • You must include universally required fields in your import files or the import will fail.
  • Don’t assign default values to fields that are both required and unique, because uniqueness errors can result.
  • You cannot make a field universally required if it is used by a field update that sets the field to a blank value.
  • Required fields may be blank on records that existed before making the field required. When a user updates a record with a blank required field, the user must enter a value in the required field before saving the record.
  • Web-to-Lead and Web-to-Case request data is not validated by Salesforce. Invalid data isn’t saved when requests are submitted. For example, if your custom field is a currency field and a user enters alphabetic characters such as “Abc” instead of numbers, the request is still submitted but with no value saved in the custom currency field.

See Also

 
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