Salesforce Winter 21 Release: Rule of 6

The Salesforce Winter 21 release is planned to hit production on the weekends of the 10th/17th October. In preparation for this Clive Platt and I will be running another of our world famous release webinars. Sign up for the webinar here, but if you can’t wait, we’ve called out our 6 favourite features right here.

Email Template Builder

Admins no longer have to learn HTML to create engaging emails, as email templates finally get a drag and drop builder. Following the trusted approach of the Lightning App Builder, there’s a palette of components, a canvas to drop them on and a sidebar to allow editing of a specific component’s properties. Note that the builder is only available for new templates, you can’t open existing Classic or Lightning templates.

Opportunity Deal Change Highlights

Updated dates and amounts are highlighted when opportunities are displayed in list and kanban view. Amounts that go up and dates that come in are displayed in green with a green arrow pointing up, while amounts that go down and dates that go out appear in red with a red arrow pointing down. Hovering over an arrow shows the previous and current values, when the change was made and who made it.

Dynamic Actions GA

Only for desktop and custom objects, but a step in the right direction. Dynamic actions decouples Lightning Experience Actions from Page Layouts, allowing actions to be added or removed directly in the Lightning App Builder. It also allows conditional rendering of an action based on the record’s fields, assigned permissions and other criteria. 

Page Reference Navigation with Notifications

Currently users can only click on a notification and navigate to a specific record. In Winter 21, you can send them to anything that can be represented by the PageReference class, including Lightning Apps and external URLs.

Safe Navigation Operator

One for the pro coders. Rather than testing every element in a property or method call chain, simply use the safe navigation operator (?.) which returns null if the left hand side of the operator is null, and evaluates the right hand side if the left hand side is not null.

Instead of :

if (myInstance!=null) {
result=myInstance.myMethod();
}

use : 

result=myInstance?.myMethod();

Before Delete Flows

One for the low-coders. Flows can now execute before a record is deleted from the database in the same way that a before delete trigger does. These are autolaunched flows that can carry out tasks such as updating related records.  Note that you can’t use the Apex addError() method to add custom error messages that stop the delete completing – you’ll still need to create an Apex trigger if you need to do this.

You can sign up for the BrightGen release webinar here at 4pm GMT on October 7th, ahead of the Salesforce Winter 21 Release production date.. If you can’t make it, sign up anyway to get the recording, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.