Salesforce1 Mobile App Admin Guide

Introduction
Get Your Organization Ready for Mobile: The Big Picture
Configure Your Organization for Salesforce1
Customize How Your Data Appears in Salesforce1
Using Actions in Salesforce1
Working with Quick Actions
Object-Specific versus Global Actions
Action Categories and Types
Action Layouts
Using Predefined Values in Actions
Custom Actions
Actions and Page Layouts
Action Guidelines and Best Practices
Visualforce Pages and Salesforce1
Make the Salesforce1 App Yours with Custom Branding
Learning More
Appendices
PDF

Object-Specific versus Global Actions

Regardless of what kind of action you’re going to create, the first thing you need to determine is whether it should be object-specific or global. This decision should be based on whether you need your action to be explicitly tied to an object, and where you want the action to display.

Let’s go over the differences.

Object-Specific Actions

You create object-specific actions in the context of the object. From Setup, click Customize, choose the object for which you want to create an action, and then click Buttons, Links, and Actions. You can add an object-specific action only to page layouts for that object.

There are five types of object-specific actions.
  • Object-specific actions create records that are automatically associated with related records. For example, you add an object-specific action on the Account object that creates contacts. If a user creates a contact with that action on the detail page for the Acme account, that new contact is automatically associated with Acme.
  • Object-specific update actions make it easy for users to edit records. You can define the fields that are available for update.
  • Object-specific Log a Call actions let users enter notes about calls, meetings, or other interactions that are related to a specific record.
  • Object-specific custom actions are Visualforce pages or canvas apps that let users interact with or create records that have a relationship to an object record.The Visualforce page for an object-specific custom action must include the standard controller for the relevant object. For example, use the standard contact controller, if you want to create a custom action that lets users import a contact’s Twitter profile and add that information to a contact record.
  • Send email actions, available only on cases, give users access to a simplified version of the Case Feed Email action on Salesforce1.

Global Actions

You create global actions in a different place in Setup than you create object-specific actions. To create a global action, in Setup, click Create | Global Actions | Actions. They’re called global actions because they can be put anywhere actions are supported.

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.

Add Log a Call actions to global layouts to let users record call details from the publisher on the Home page and the Chatter tab in the full Salesforce site, or from the action bar on global pages such as Feed or Groups in Salesforce1.

Use a Visualforce page or a canvas app to create a global custom action for tasks that don’t require users to interact with or create records that have a relationship to a specific object. For more information, see Custom Actions.

  • Actions to create records for an object that is the detail object in a master-detail relationship must be object-specific, not global.
  • Chatter groups with customers don’t support global create, log a call, or custom actions and display only standard actions, such as Post, File, Link, and Poll, in both the publisher in the full Salesforce site and the action bar in Salesforce1.

Note

After you create an object-specific or global action, you must add it to a page layout or the global publisher layout before it will appear in Salesforce1. For more information, see Actions and Page Layouts.

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