Working with Compact Layouts

Page layouts aren’t the only thing that you can use to customize how Salesforce data appears in a mobile environment. Compact layouts display a record’s key fields at a glance in both Salesforce1 and Lightning Experience.

Creating and customizing compact layouts for objects isn’t required for Salesforce1, because system defaults are provided out of the box. However, we recommend using compact layouts to put important fields into object record headers—and elsewhere—to help your mobile users get the information they need quickly.

In the full Salesforce site, a compact layout determines which fields appear in the Chatter feed item that appears after a user creates a record with a quick action.

In Salesforce1, the first four fields that you assign to a compact layout appear in:
  • An object’s record highlights area
  • Expanded lookup cards on a record’s related information page

For example, here are screenshots of a merchandise record page in Salesforce1 before and after customizing the compact layout for the object.

Compact Layout Before and After

If you put the key fields that your mobile users need on the compact layout for an object, they can get that information quickly just by scanning the highlights area of the record page.

As with page layouts, there are separate compact layouts for each object. By default, each object derives its record highlight fields, preview cards, and action-related feed items from the predefined set of fields in the object’s read-only, system default compact layout. You can create custom compact layouts on an object-by-object basis. After you create one or more custom compact layouts, you set one as the primary compact layout for the object. The primary compact layout is then used as the new default for that object.