Quick Actions in Salesforce

Quick actions are part of the salesforce mobile app. The only time I’ve ever used or set up quick actions were for trailhead or for studying for the App Builder exam.

So I am not too versed in them at all, but let’s learn together! In general salesforce is the quickest way to build a mobile app. Hands down. This is because you just log on and salesforces code base transforms almost all the work you’ve done in set up into their mobile app.

When studying for an exam that covers the mobile app (like app builder) there are a few things you’ll need to study. First is the navigation bar, what UI things you can design with the load screen, and Quick Actions.

There are two types of quick actions Object Specific and Global. Let’s explain the two, hopefully, in a way that makes sense!

Object Specific

Object Specific Quick Actions are pretty self explanatory these are quick actions, with in the mobile app, that are only related to the specific object.

If you are on the exam there will be some wording like ‘creating a record related to the one that you are currently viewing’ and that will almost always be object-specific quick actions.

Salesforces’ trailhead module on this explains object specific quick actions as able to update the record you are on or to create records that are automatically associated with that record you are viewing.

Their example is with a real estate broker who is scheduling a new showing with their clients on the mobile app. They would like the new showing to be related to the contact detail page. This new showing when created will be a new button on the contact page action bar called ‘new showing’ here you can set the time and description and it creates an event with in salesforce.

You can see this example here

Does that attempt to explain this well?

Global Quick Actions

The section type of mobile quick action is global quick actions. These are actions that can be performed on anywhere within the mobile app. While these are located in the same action bar they are not necessarily related to the record.

These are things such as creating a new contact, prospect, or event. All things that if you are on the go and only have your phone, you can complete and complete fast.

Many global actions on mobile will only ask for basic information. These are all likely going to be things like name, phone, email, and maybe one or two other things to get from your contact or lead.

You can look at examples and documentation from salesforce here

Publisher Layouts

The third thing that is important to note, is that there is a specific place to complete the layouts for the mobile app and it’s called the publisher layout. This is on the global layout in the setup and you’ll need to override the predefined actions here to edit it.

Like you can see in the photo this is how you will drag and drop to add a new global quick action to the mobile experience.

Where things get kinda confusing

So for the longest time I could not figure out why this was so confusing. It happens that on the desktop version of salesforce there are also quick actions.

These are things that can also be on the mobile app like log a call or send an email. When it’s just quick actions they will generally be referring to the browser based ones.

If you are in mobile or talking about object specific actions or global actions then it will most likely refer to the mobile ones.

I really hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions down below!

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