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Adjust Your Existing Customizations
Most of your existing point-and-click and programmatic customizations work seamlessly in Lightning Experience. But some customizations aren’t useful or relevant outside of Salesforce Classic. And some aspects of your classic implementation require adjustment for best results in Lightning Experience. Here’s a look at issues to consider.
Salesforce Apps and the Navigation Bar
See Upgrade Classic Apps to Lightning Apps in Salesforce Help.
Page Layouts, Compact Layouts, and Utility Bars
Record page customizations made in Salesforce Classic—for custom and standard objects—also affect record pages in Lightning Experience. However, some page elements display differently in Lightning Experience, and some aren’t supported.
Compact layouts play the same role in Lightning Experience and the Salesforce mobile app: displaying a record’s key fields in the highlights panel on a record page. In Lightning Experience, the highlights panel shows the first seven fields from your current compact layout. The Salesforce mobile app shows up to ten fields from the compact layout.
Provide instant access to productivity tools, like integrated voice, by adding a utility bar to Lightning apps. The utility bar displays in the Lightning Experience footer.
Actions and Buttons
If you’ve already created and used actions in Salesforce Classic, you know that they appear in the Chatter publisher, while standard and custom buttons appear above the details on a record page. And if you use the Salesforce mobile app, you know that all action types and buttons are co-mingled on the action bar. In Lightning Experience, we continue to blur the line between actions and buttons. But instead of displaying in a single place, actions and buttons are grouped by type in several different areas on the record page.
By default, Lightning Experience includes the actions and buttons defined in the Salesforce Mobile and Lightning Experience Actions section on the global publisher layout. Or you can customize what’s available using the same section on object page layouts. Here’s the logic that determines where on the record page an action or button appears.
- Global actions with the Log a Call action type or the Create a Record action type for events, notes, and tasks display in the Global Actions menu in the header.
- Most quick actions, productivity actions, standard buttons, and supported custom buttons are added to the action menu in the highlights panel.
- Object-specific activities-related actions, such as Log a Call, New Event, New Task, and Email, display in the composer on the Activity tab if you’re using the activity timeline. Otherwise they appear in the activities related lists.
- Standard Chatter actions appear in the composer on the Chatter tab.
The order of actions in each area is based on the order in which they’ve been added to the global publisher or object page layout.
See Actions in Lightning Experience in Salesforce Help.
Custom Buttons
Custom buttons and links that use a JavaScript content source aren’t supported in Lightning Experience. Custom buttons that define the content source as a URL or Visualforce page work as you’d expect.
Attachments and Classic Notes
For a better experience, convert existing attachments to Salesforce Files and classic notes to enhanced notes. See Convert Attachments and Classic Notes.
Salesforce Knowledge
Moving your Classic knowledge base into Lightning Knowledge gives users a seamless experience and a much better workflow. See Migrate Your Classic Knowledge Base to Lightning Knowledge.
Visualforce and Lightning Components
Visualforce is supported in Lightning Experience and most of your existing Visualforce pages work without any revisions needed. But some pages may need tweaking, and things have moved around in the new interface, so do some testing to confirm that your Visualforce pages behave as expected. If you find problems, check out Update Visualforce Markup for Lightning Experience.
Here are a few other considerations.
- If your Visualforce pages use JavaScript, there are things you should check. Visualforce doesn’t “own” the whole page when shown in Lightning Experience, and because of that, your JavaScript code needs to play by some new rules.
- If your Visualforce pages use the built-in standard components, their look-and-feel matches Salesforce Classic, whether users access them in the new or old interface. But it’s easy to assign the Lightning Experience stylesheets so pages have classic styling in Salesforce Classic and Lightning styling in Lightning Experience.
- We recommend checking out the Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS) for a collection of design patterns, components, and guidelines for creating interfaces that fit in with Lightning Experience. The SLDS is available at www.lightningdesignsystem.com.
What about UI customization? The Lightning Component framework is our UI framework for developing dynamic web apps for both desktop and mobile devices. You can use it or Visualforce in your new projects.
Canvas
Canvas allows you to easily integrate third-party applications in Salesforce. Canvas functionality in Lightning Experience is the same as in Salesforce Classic. You can still embed Canvas apps in Visualforce pages and everywhere else they’re supported, with the bonus that you can expose Canvas apps in Lightning components.
Salesforce APIs and Apex
Most of the programmatic tools and processes you’re used to are largely unaffected by Lightning Experience. We’ve kept our promise that our new releases won’t break your dependencies on Salesforce APIs. Your development environment is the same as ever.
While your Apex classes and API calls work fine, some features aren’t yet supported in Lightning Experience. If a user is in the new interface and executes some Apex code that interacts with an unsupported feature, the user can’t complete the task. To address this scenario, we’ve added capabilities to determine a user’s interface preference from both the API and Apex. You can use this functionality to add logic to your existing code so that your users don’t encounter errors. See “Understand Changes to Other Development Tools" in the Lightning Experience Development Trailhead module for full details.
AppExchange Apps
Many apps from AppExchange feature customizations, including custom objects, custom buttons, Visualforce pages, and more. Salesforce partners have tested their apps in Lightning Experience and applied for Lightning Ready and Powered by Lightning certification. Apps that are Lightning Ready work in Lightning Experience and fit in with other apps and pages in the interface. If an app is supported in Lightning Experience, a Lightning Ready sash appears on its AppExchange listing. If an app isn’t supported in Lightning Experience, use it in Salesforce Classic instead.
