Lightning fails to strike

Rob Cowell
2 min readAug 1, 2018

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Go home Lightning, you’re drunk

Where I work, a new business use case came up from another division, whereby we needed a completely separate Salesforce org from our existing (Classic) org. This was an ideal opportunity to create a Lightning org from scratch, rather than have to migrate it later. It was also my first opportunity to get my hands on Lightning outside of Trailhead or a classroom.

The implementation in question is a Service Cloud implementation at heart — predominantly leveraging out of the box functionality and declarative processes for an extremely code-free solution. Clicks not code, right?

Buttons and pages

One of the requirements we had was for internal surveys. AppExchange and Salesforce Labs to the rescue with the SurveyForce package. It’s not pure Lightning, but it’s SLDS styled to look like it, which is a good compromise. There’s a VisualForce page for taking a survey, which takes URL params for the SurveyId, the CaseId, the ContactId, etc. — but…. how do I open that page from a button on the Case record page? In Classic, a detail page button would be added that opens the URL. We’ve done this hundreds of times over the years.

Not an option in Lightning. Quick Actions don’t have an option to open a URL, let alone passing parameters into it.

Ended up writing a custom Lightning component that takes the parameters from the Case and constructs the URL, then calls a Javascript window.open to launch it.

It shouldn’t require so much effort to do the simple things that Classic can do as standard.

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Rob Cowell
Rob Cowell

Written by Rob Cowell

Salesforce Dev/Architect with a bunch of unfounded opinions