The Salesforce Spring 21 release is planned to go live in production on the 5th/12th of February and, as is traditional now, Clive Platt and I will be running yet another of our world famous release webinars. Sign up for the webinar here, but if you need something to whet your appetite, we’ve called out 5 key features, and a warning.
Multi-field selection in report builder
Speed up your report building by selecting multiple fields (using the SHIFT or CMD/CTRL keys, depending on your operating system), then drag them directly on to the report preview or outline panel.
Fields function in SOQL
Query all fields, all standard fields or all custom fields on an object using a single function in your SELECT statement – FIELD. This doesn’t mean you can forget about field names in your Apex code, as only the standard fields variant is supported in Apex. However, this will definitely save some keystrokes if you are accessing a lot of standard fields in your pro-code.
See prior values of the record that triggered the flow
One for the low coders – when a flow is triggered by a record update, you can now use the $Record__Prior global variable to see the original fields on the record. Getting closer to parity with triggers.
Lightning Web runtime GA for experience cloud
If you are building experiences (formerly known as communities) using only Lightning Web Components, you can take advantage of the new Build Your Own (LWR) template and see major performance gains.
Convert leads to a person and business account at the same time
Another one for the pro-coders – rather than converting all leads to an account and contact, if you have person accounts enabled, you can create a business account and a person account with new methods on the LeadConvert class.
WARNING
And finally, the warning. The Spring 21 release notes give notice that API V20 and lower for Bulk, SOAP and REST APis are retiring in Summer 21 – requests to these endpoints will error once the Summer 21 release is live. If you have some older integrations that haven’t been touched for years, you’ll want to start testing them against later (preferably the latest) version of the API.
The BrightGen Spring 21 release webinar takes place on 3rd Feb at 4pm, so go ahead and sign up here and we’ll see you then. If you can’t make it, sign up anyway to get the recording, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.