The Official Salesforce Blog - Feature Details

• Summer '08 Feature Showcase: Enhanced Lists

  Jun 4, 2008

  Hello! It's your friendly Salesforce product manager here, with some great news to share about an awesome feature being delivered in the Summer '08 release - Enhanced Lists!

  Last year, we gave you inline editing on record detail pages. While I knew it would be a hit (or, at least, I certainly hoped it would be), I also knew that it would only be a matter of time before the requests would start pouring in for inline editing from list views. Sure enough, Tannic didn't waste any time, and 6 days after the Winter '08 release, an idea was logged. :-)

  I'm happy to announce that the new Enhanced List feature in the Summer '08 release offers you powerful, easy-to-use tools to quickly display, customize (and even edit!) lists of records imperative for your day-to-day work routine.

  The sensational new editing capabilities we've included allow you to edit a single record, or multiple - up to 200 - records, directly from a list, never leaving the page. And with a wide range of new navigation options - for example, displaying the record count (up to 2000), specifying number of records displayed per page, jump to a specific page, and first & last page links - you can find the information you’re looking for in no time.

  We also included drag-and-drop support for moving columns around, as well as changing a column's width by dragging the right side of the column header.

  For those of you who have created custom mass action buttons to act on multiple records in a list view, we also now remember selections across multiple pages. Gone are the days of selecting records on a single page, then clicking the action button, then going to the next page, selecting more records, etc.

  In order to realize the full benefit of this feature, administrators must turn on both the "Enable Inline Editing" and "Enable Enhanced Lists" preferences from the Setup | Customize | User Interface page.

  Full Disclosure: There are also some things about this new feature that we want to improve upon in the near future. For one, the fields excluded from inline editing on list views are the same ones excluded on detail pages (Opportunity Stage, Opportunity Forecast Category, Contract Status, most Task and Event fields) with the addition of Opportunity Amount, Opportunity Quantity, Lead Status, and Case Status. The good news is that we're working closely with other teams internally to get these fields enabled for you as soon as we can. (Note that some of these fields already have mass action buttons on list views so you still have a way to edit them.) Also, for companies using record types, the list view has to have filter criteria specified that restricts the result set to one record type in order for editing to be available. There are similar filter restrictions for tasks and events as well, but you can read all about it in both the Summer '08 release notes, as well as the online help. Just navigate to any list view, and click the "Help for this Page" link in the upper right.

  We know we still have some work to do, but hopefully you'll find these new enhancements to be both time-saving and fun to use. Everyone have a great summer, and keep those ideas coming!

  -- Eric

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• Custom Report Types

  Aug 20, 2007

  Basis of reporting

  Reporting is one of the most-used features in salesforce, but users and admins have seen that either:

  • the standard reports are not exactly what they want
  • and that when building a report through the wizard, they see either too many or too few fields

  In these cases, traditionally, the user has had few options, and the admin has either had to use the Excel Add-in, or use a partner solution.

  Custom Report Types

  Custom Report Types allow a user with "view setup" and the permission in their profile to create custom report types to build the flow through the report wizard. You might want to give this permission to users with advanced reporting requirements, because you don't need to be an administrator to create these CRTs (Custom Report Types).

  The user chooses the CRT in the report wizard, just as they choose the report type today. In previous release for example, they could choose the "Accounts and Contacts" report type category:

  

  The user has a list of the report types that are based on the Account and the Contact objects. With CRTs, when using the report wizard, the user has access to all the standard report types, as well as any new CRTs that are published.

  Building a Custom Report Type

  There are two general categories of CRTs:

  • Those similar to existing report types, just with different fields (for instance, to add in "opportunity owner role", or to remove all the unused fields)
  • New Report Types

  In the first case, you can copy the objects used in the standard report, and work with the user requesting the report type to choose the extra fields. Fields accessible via records which are related through a lookup relationship (see the blog post "First Custom Report Type" for a guide on how to do that)

  In the second case, you should look at:

  • What object is the most important, and the object from which records should be returned under any circumstances. Also, the scope choices "e.g. My, My team, All" are on this object.
  • Which other objects are related lists of this one do you want to report on
  • which fields from objects related via lookup to those chosen for the 2 reasons above you want to include.

  
  

  The ways you can make reporting better for your users

  • CRT will allow you to make a simpler report wizard experience for users that only care about a few specific fields
  • If you want to report on fields that are not in the standard report types but related to the objects, CRT will let you create a report type including fields from lookups
  • CRT creation wizard includes fileds that are only present currently in the API
  • If you want to report on more than 2 related custom objects, you can create a hierarchy of 4 using CRT.

  
  

  Example - reducing fields:

  Here, I've built a CRT based on Accounts and Contacts. I've removed all the address fields, because my telesales people only need phone numbers and states.
  We base the report type on Accounts.

  
  
  
  Then choose to relate accounts to contacts for the results we'll want.
  

  
  
  
  Here, I've used the field layout on the Custom Report Type to remove many of the fields:
  

  
  
  
  And here's the result in the report wizard -  a much simpler experience for these users.
  

  

  The same fields, in the same sections will be available in the filtering, and the date fields here will be used in the date filters in resulting reports.
  
  More information is available in the help, or in articles on the Analytics blog - blogs.salesforce.com/analytics
  
  Contributed by Thomas Tobin
  
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