Salesforce App Admin Guide

Introduction
Get Your Organization Ready for Mobile: The Big Picture
Configure Your Organization for the Salesforce App
Customize How Your Data Appears in the Salesforce App
How Page Layouts Work in the Salesforce Mobile App
Working with Compact Layouts
Compact Layouts
Using Actions in the Salesforce App
Visualforce Pages and the Salesforce App
Work Offline with the Salesforce App
Make the Salesforce App Yours with Custom Branding
Learning More
Appendices
PDF

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. A compact layout displays a record’s key fields at a glance in both the Salesforce mobile app and Lightning Experience.

Creating and customizing compact layouts for objects isn’t required for the Salesforce app, 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 the Salesforce mobile app, the first four fields that you assign to a compact layout appear in:
  • An object record’s highlights area
  • Expanded lookup cards on a record’s related information page

For example, here are screenshots of a merchandise record page in Salesforce 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.