About Actions

The publisher actions feature lets you create actions and add them to the Chatter publisher on the home page, on the Chatter tab, in Chatter groups, and on record detail pages. Actions also appear in the action tray in Salesforce1. In addition, actions have their own action layouts, which let you specify which fields are included in the action, and in which order.

In the Salesforce1 app, actions show up in the action tray, which you can get to by tapping Publisher Actions icon.

Salesforce1 Publisher

There are several types of actions you can create using point-and-click tools in Salesforce.
  • Create actions let users create records. They’re different from the Quick Create and Create New features on the Salesforce home page, because create actions respect validation rules and field requiredness, and you can choose each action’s fields.
  • Log a call actions let users record the details of phone calls or other customer interactions. These call logs are saved as completed tasks.
  • Update actions let users make changes to a record from the record’s feed.
  • Question actions let users ask and search for questions about the records they’re working with.

Developers can create a fourth type of action: a custom action. Custom actions are Visualforce pages or canvas apps with functionality you define. For example, you might create a custom action to let users write comments longer than 5000 characters, or one that integrates a video conferencing application so support agents can communicate visually with customers.

For create, log-a-call, and custom actions—which we’ll go over at the end of this chapter—you can create either object-specific actions or global actions. Update actions must be object-specific.

Object-Specific Actions

Object-specific create actions let users create records that are automatically associated with related records. For example, you might set up an object-specific action on the Account object to allow users to create contacts. If a user creates a contact on the detail page for Acme, Inc., that contact will automatically be associated with Acme. You can only add an object-specific action to page layouts for that object.

Global Actions

Global create actions enable users to create object records, but there’s no automatic relationship between the record that’s created and any other record. You can add global actions to page layouts for the Home page, the Chatter tab, Chatter groups, and any object that hasn’t overridden the global publisher layout.

Add global log a call actions to global layouts to let users record call details from the publisher on the Home page, the Chatter tab, and in Chatter groups. They can also record call details directly from their phone while in Salesforce1.

Actions to create records for an object that is the detail object in a master-detail relationship must be object-specific, not global.

Note

For a list of supported objects for object-specific and global actions, see “Object-Specific Actions Overview” and “Global Actions Overview” in the Salesforce Help.