Force.com Platform Fundamentals

Preface
Introducing the Force.com Platform
About the Sample Recruiting App
Reviewing Database Concepts
Building a Simple App
Enhancing the Simple App with Advanced Fields, Data Validation, and Page Layouts
Expanding the Simple App Using Relationships
Securing and Sharing Data
Collaborating with Chatter
Introducing Chatter
Tracking Fields on Your Objects
Following Records
Starting a Group or Two
Introducing Notifications
Introducing Actions
Try It Out: Create a Global Action
Introducing Global Publisher Layouts
Introducing Object-Specific Actions
Try It Out: Assign Object-Specific Quick Actions to Page Layouts
Look At What We’ve Done
Summing Up
Automating Business Processes
Analyzing Data with Reports and Dashboards
Moving Beyond Point-and-Click App Development
Learning More
Glossary
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Introducing Actions

Now that we’ve turned on Chatter, we’ve seen what it can do for users who are communicating with each other directly. There’s one more feature that takes advantage of Chatter to save your users time in their day-to-day tasks: quick actions, also known as simply actions. 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. Choose from standard actions, such as create and update actions, or create actions based on your company’s needs.

Actions make it easier for your users to work directly from wherever they are in the app.

Example

For example, Megan Smith no longer has to go to the navigation menu, open the Contacts item, click New, and specify which account her new contact should be associated with. With actions, she can create a new contact for that account by simply clicking—or tapping—the associated action in either the Chatter publisher in the full site or in the action bar in Salesforce1. Actions do the work for her.
In the Chatter publisher, we already have a handful of default actions.
  • Standard Chatter actions are included when Chatter is enabled.
  • Create actions are actions that let users create records—like New Contact, New Opportunity, and New Lead. They respect your validation rules and field requiredness, and you can choose which fields display for each action.
  • Log a call actions let users record the details of phone calls or other customer interactions. These call logs are saved as completed tasks.
  • Question actions enable users to ask and search for questions about the records that they’re working with.
  • Update actions let users make changes to a record through its detail page
Most of these out-of-the-box actions aren’t very helpful for users of our recruiting app, but we can easily customize this feature. In this section, we’ll be personalizing the actions that appear for our users throughout the full site and Salesforce1.
With the platform, we can declaratively create three types of actions.
  • Create actions
  • Log a call actions
  • Update actions

We can’t create standard actions, but we can control whether they show up or not, as well as what order they show up in. For create and log a call actions, we can create either global or object-specific actions. For update actions, we can only create object-specific actions.