Accelerate Adoption Using Quick Actions Everywhere

Quick Actions in Salesforce are a fast way to predefine field values and streamline inputs for speedy, seamless entry of data—thus their name, Quick Actions. However, do you find that your upper-right-hand bar in Lightning is overloaded or that Case Actions are a bit confusing to end-users? That’s where Quick Actions Everywhere, the open-source (free!), Lightning-ready app, comes into play. This app allows you to leverage Quick Actions (almost) everywhere!

Why I created the Quick Actions open-source app

In early 2019, based on multiple community ideas that were posted, I saw that there was a big gap in some of the capabilities of Salesforce Lightning. Because I am someone who likes to solve complex problems on the platform, I took a hard look at what tools were available, reviewed several ideas on the Trailblazer Community, and solicited feedback from trusted community members to solve the problem: “If Quick Actions could do ____________, I would like them more.” It was this guiding question that led me to develop the Quick Actions Everywhere app.

What are the Quick Action app benefits?

Let’s start with the benefits of installing this app:

1. Lightning, Classic, and mobile-friendly
2. Open-sourced—free!
3. Easy to install—with the click of a button or, if you’re a developer, you can leverage SFDX
4. Allows you to put Quick Actions, Lightning Components, or Flows in Related Lists
5. Secure—it only accesses Salesforce native APIs and follows best practices around Lightning Component design
6. Supports all Salesforce objects where you can use Quick Actions—Standard and Custom

Sample use cases

There are a few questions to ask yourself before you build with Quick Actions Everywhere:

Am I performing simple related record updates or record creations with predefined values?

➡️ If you answered yes, then you can leverage a global or object-specific Quick Action.

Do I need to perform branching logic, such as review related records, before performing an action?

➡️ If you answered yes, then you would want to use a Flow or Lightning Component.

Now to the use cases!

Use case #1:

As a Sales user, I would like:

• Minimal Fields on Entry.
• The stage defaulted to “Prospecting”.
• The opportunity to close in 30 days (based on the company’s sales cycle).

Solution: Leverage a Quick Action

What you get:

How to set up:

Go to “Global Actions” in setup and set your defaults.

Here, we set our stage to be 30 days from today and the stage to “Prospecting”.

Go to the “Opportunity” object and create a “Related” list button.

Here, we set the URL to be pointed to the “Global Action” using the “action” parameter.

• We create a “Title” for the tab (which is useful in particular for console in Lightning).
• The “relatedId” tells Quick Actions Everywhere what ID to relate the Quick Action to.
• Lastly, the “relatedField” tells the app which field to populate with the relatedId parameter.

That’s it! You’ve set up your first related Quick Action! Now, let’s move on to something a bit more complex.

Use case #2:

As a Sales user, I would like:

• Minimal Fields on Entry.
• The stage defaulted to “Prospecting”.
• The opportunity to close in 30 days (based on the company’s sales cycle).
• To propose that if an account does not have an installation plan, they add it to their opportunity.

Solution: Leverage a flow

Notice how the requirements are the same except for the last requirement? When you need to look at related objects and traverse relationships, you’ll want to leverage a flow for your requirements.

What you get:

The setup is a bit complex to lay out here, but here are some high-level tips when you’re creating a flow with Quick Actions Everywhere:

• Create a recordId variable and always make it input / output.
• If you want to redirect to a newly created record, use an assignment node to set the recordId variable to the newly created record ID.
• Always have a success or error screen so that the user knows what occurred during the flow.

In order to create a flow button, you need two things:

• The recordId passed via the “relatedId” parameter
• The flow developer name passed via the “flowDevName” parameter

Here’s the above example’s setup:

How do I get my hands on Quick Actions?

Do I have you convinced? If so, you can download the Quick Actions Everywhere app to your sandbox and production by going to this GitHub repository. This repository outlines how to install the app in seven easy steps, the parameters that you can use with the tool, and FAQs. If you happen to run across any issues with the app in your adventures, or if you have a great idea for expanding the app, you can log an issue and it will be reviewed. 

You might be asking yourself, “What if I don’t know where to start with Quick Actions?” My answer to that is to get started with educating yourself on Quick Actions with the Salesforce Mobile App Customization and Lightning Experience Customization badges. This will give you a great foundation to begin building apps that your users will enjoy.

Keep calm and build on, #AwesomeAdmin!