Posted January 27, 2020

URL Hacks are back and in Lightning with Spring ’20

Before the coming of Salesforce Lightning Experience, I was a big fan of URL Hacks. These not officially support features gave us to the capability to change Salesforce funtionalty by simply changing the information in the URL. Common use cases was to pre-fill the “new record” screen or fill in or change a field in the “edit record” screen. We could do some crazy automation-like things. I wrote about URL Hacks a lot.

Then Lightning Experience cam and with it, the official outlawing of URL Hacks. Instead, we were given actions and ability to pre-fill forms that were not the full “new” or “edit” screens but some poor approximation. We also lost all the other cool things we used to be able to do by simply hacking the URL. I grew despondant. I was a very vocal advocate for doing something. I was so sure that URL Hack functionality needed to be there, that I figured out how to do it with Flow. Combining Flow and Lightning Component Local actions we could do a lot that was URL Hack like. Doug Ayers took my concept one step further and gave you an actual URL hack -albiet one that required a lot of code.

I was very surprised when I opened up my copy of the Salesforce Spring Release Notes and discovered that URL Hacks are back in Lightning! Kind of, some what… and I also discovered that despite years of screaming I want URL Hacks, I’m pretty annoyed at this.

So URL Hacks are back in town. Let’s look at what you can do with them and why you may not want to use them. On the bright side, I get to re-use a feature image from a previous post.

How They Work

URL Hacks in Lightning are a bit better than in Classic in one way – the URL is easier.

In classic, we had to find out what the Field’s Name/ID was in the HTML and reference that in the URL. The big problem was those references changed from Sandbox to Production and potentially whenever your instance changed. It was very annoying since you couldn’t pre-fix things. You had to wait until they were broken and THEN fix the issue.

The example the Release Notes provide looks like this:

/lightning/o/Account/new?defaultFieldValues=
    Name={!URLENCODE(Account.Name)},
    OwnerId={!Account.OwnerId},
    AccountNumber={!Account.AccountNumber},
    NumberOfEmployees=35000,
    CustomCheckbox__c={!IF(Account.SomeCheckbox__c, true, false)}

Let’s break that down.

When we create a new Account the URL is currently: /lightning/o/Account/new?

That’s identical to the URL hack and hasn’t changed. The new bit comes after the question mark and that’s “defaultFieldValues=” In our URL Hack Parlance this is a URL Parameter. After the questionmark the browser knows anything afterwards is a parameter. All parameters are in a key=value format. So for this example, our key is defaultFieldValues and our values are a combination of Keys and values for the field and their values.

Name={!URLENCODE(Account.Name)} this part is important. The important bit is URLENCODE. This is a function that will take any non-url friendly character and convert it to a friendly version. For example, if the account name was “Better Partners” URLENCODE will turn it to “Better%20Partners” Spaces are not acceptable in the URL Format. Anything that is not just a list of numbers, a single word, or contains any funky characters will need the URLENCODE function

Then we have a comma to separate the next field and value pair. This is significant since in typical URL Hack we would separate fields with a & to denote a new parameter. In this circumstance all the Field/Value pairs are really just 1 value to the defaultFieldValue key. So it’s not as simple as copy/pasting existing URL hacks from classic. You will need to do some conversion.

Why I No Longer Like URL Hacks

First, I totally understand why people like URL Hacks. They’re fast. They’re “easy.” They gave us access to the full page layout. We could also do some funky other stuff in Classic.

In Lightning, we can only create new records. While this is nice, I personally prefer to use a Lightning Component or a Flow with a Lightning Component action instead to get the URL Hack functionality in Lightning.

URL Hack Functionality In Lightning?!

Why? Well for a few reasons. First, I think it gives us more ability in the long run. Yes, you need to have a custom lightning component, but in the circumstance for creating new records it’s not that difficult to do and involves no Apex code. Second, it uses 100% lightning supported features which means it works in Mobile. Third, because we’re using Flow and Lightning Components, we may be able to do other things besides creating new records.

More Ability

This currently works ONLY for new records. I tried to create a URL Hack so we could update an existing record. The URL Format is a bit different: /lightning/r/Contact/0030M000028DAvKQAW/edit?

Note that instead of an “o” it’s an “r” before the object. We also have the record Id and the word “edit” instead of “new.” I was hoping by simply adding defaultFieldValues= after the the question mark I could add more information. For example /lightning/r/Contact/0030M000028DAvKQAW/edit?defaultFieldValues=description=Test%20Hello This doesn’t work.

So we can only create new records.

Mobile

Lightning is very handy because it’s now the system that drives our mobile platform – especially in the Spring 20 release. I created a URL hack that simply defaults the name of the account and the description. I took my sample URL Hack and tried in mobile.

My result:

URL Hack Spring 20 in Mobile

Not exactly what I call friendly. Since the Lightning buttons/actions and the mobile buttons use the same set up on the page layout – you’re stuck. This is especially true if you have users that use both Desktop and Mobile and cannot create a mobile only page layout.

The Flow/Lightning Component Action solution does work in mobile.

More Functionality

This is a bit redundant with the first option. The fact is because in my example we use flow and Lightning Components, we can create a whole bunch of cool automation. We could create a “hack” that sends email, creates records, update records, does a bunch of stuff and navigates us to a new page. Why we would want to limit ourselves to a URL only is mystifying to me now. I understand it’s easier for lots of folks to wrap their head around, but the automation platform is going to Flow. It’s something you’re going to want to learn and should learn.

For me, the new URL Hack functionality in Spring 20 is a short cut. If your only need is to create a new record, default field values, and a action isn’t good enough – go right ahead and use it. But if the main reason you’re doing it is because you don’t think you can handle using a Flow with some Lightning Component actions – then stop. Take the time to learn how to do it. The URL Hack may be an acceptable short-term, “I need this out right now” solution, but you’ll be closing your off to the amazing capabilities you could do with just a little education and imagination. Plus, who wants something that only works in desktop and fails in the mobile world these days?

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Brian Kwong

Has been Administrating and Developing on the Salesforce.com platform since 2007. Brian was made a Salesforce MVP in Winter '13 and is co-leader of the Wisconsin Salesforce User & developer group. http://wisconsin.salesforceusergroups.com He's known to occasionally walk around with a Wizard's hat on his head - particularly during trainings, user group meetings and Dreamforce. Just what is with the hat? https://thewizardnews.com/2015/02/26/the-story-of-the-hat/