When the Salesforce Lightning Experience was first announced, everyone was so excited to play around with this new interface and start customizing the user experience like never before. But when you actually started diving in, a lot was restricted, and there was barely anything you could customize without code. But these days are long gone!
For quite some time now, Salesforce has given us a whole host of standard lightning components to play around with – the newest addition being Dynamic Forms on key standard objects available in Winter ‘23. Admins with any level of experience can nowadays leverage a wide range of components to enhance their user’s Lightning Pages based on their role, field values or even form factor (just to name a few!)
What are the Standard Lightning Components in Salesforce?
If you are unfamiliar with Lightning Components, it’s not a problem – let’s jump into a short intro! Essentially any of the “boxes” you see on the image below is a component.
They can perform various tasks like show reports, list views, or just some text to say hi. There are three types of lightning components:
- Standard: out-of-the-box components provided by Salesforce.
- Custom: components that are created in-house by your own development team. These will fit specific needs your organization has that can’t be fulfilled with the standard Lightning Components.
- Managed: components downloaded from the AppExchange, in the exact same way you would an app. Here are three free examples admins love.
You will be able to easily spot the different categories of components as they are grouped within the Component tab within the Lightning App Builder.
Confused about Lightning Components vs Lightning Web Components? Check out our guide.
How many Lightning Components are there in Salesforce?
At the time of writing, there are approximately 40 standard Lightning components in Salesforce, depending on the Salesforce licenses your organization has purchased. For example, the Matched Leads component is available to Salesforce customers that have a Pardot license.
Before taking a look at some of the available standard components, let’s have a quick look at where they can actually be implemented.
Home Page: Components can firstly be added to any home page within Lightning. As per the image on the right, components can be added that are most relevant for a user when they first login. A massive bonus to this is that home pages can be created per profile, meaning sales users can have sales information, and support users can have support information.
Record Page: Secondly, components can be added to any record page for an object. Components can also be added to a tabs component (more about this later).
App Page: App pages can also be created for your custom Lightning Applications. They’re similar to home pages, but these can be created specifically for apps you have created.
Note: The Embedded Service Page becomes an option if Field Service Lightning is being used and is available for the Service Appointment Object.
Start Using Standard Lightning Components Today
Now that you’re up to speed on the type of components as well as where these components can be placed, let’s dive into what they can actually do for your business!
This list will include some of the most useful as well as overlooked components, as there are a lot of components that Lightning users will already be familiar with as they are added to the page by default (so we won’t be covering these). These include Performance Chart, Assistant, News, Recent Items, Today’s Events, Today’s Tasks & Top Deals, but there is so much more!
Related List Quick Links
Perhaps one of the most overlooked but really handy of the standard components has to be the Related List Quick Links one. This is one of my personal favorites, even in developer editions, just because it makes it so much easier to navigate through related records, preview information about them or even create new records and edit existing ones – all without having to scroll through all the related lists which might be on the record page or layout.
Report Chart
The second one up is the Report Chart component. As you might have guessed from its name, this gives you the ability to add a chart that you have added to a report, directly onto your page. This applies to all three of the available Lightning pages and is effective on all of them. Giving your users the ability to see a relevant chart on the home page can kick start their day with data that is relevant to them, such as the image above showing a support manager the types of cases that have come in today.
Reports on record pages can also be filtered, which means that you can add a generic report onto the page layout but filter it depending on the record you are looking at! If you would like to know how to create your own report chart, check out the tutorial here.
And as if these weren’t enough advantages already, let’s not forget about the fairly new functionality of report inline editing! The report hyperlink can be opened from the report chart component, removing the need for users to find the report in the Reports tab first, saving quite a few precious clicks.
Dashboard
Staying on a similar tangent to the previous Case report chart component, the dashboard component allows you to place an entire dashboard within your lightning pages. Bear in mind with this component, it will bring over all components attached to the dashboard, this can be limited with the “Max Height” parameter.
Single Related List
Another really handy component which might not seem that obvious especially if you are accustomed with controlling the related lists through the page layout, is the Single Related List one. As you can imagine, not only can you choose to hide related lists which are on the layout but which shouldn’t show up on the Record Pages for certain groups of users, but you can also pick and choose where different related lists are positioned on the page for certain teams – for example, what if the Sales team should see the Opportunities closer to the top of the page in comparison to other related lists?
Dynamic Single Related List
Building on the above use case, let’s say the Sales team does need to see the Opportunities at the top of the page, but only the open ones which they should take action on. This is where the Dynamic Related List comes to play!
As you will notice in the example below, focusing on the Opportunities related list, filters can be added – in this case the standard Closed field, the fields displayed can be changed as needed and on top of this, actions can be defined to be available for use. Find out everything you need to know about Dynamic Related Lists from our ultimate guide which includes a video tutorial!
Dynamic Forms
Keeping it within the Dynamic components family, Dynamic Forms cannot go unmentioned. Although it is a bit underwhelming to call the functionality just ‘a component’, this is the newest and shiniest way to take your user experience on Lightning Record Pages up a few notches!
Currently available on custom objects and a few key standard objects as of Winter ‘23, Dynamic Forms can easily become a favorite considering the Field Section component which drives all the magic – not only can you add as many sections are needed, but you can add inside them the exact fields needed without considering the page layout anymore! Also, each individual field’s visibility can be filtered based on criteria, such as the value from a different field.
Ready to become a Dynamic Forms adept? Check out our deep-dive tutorial to get started. To make sure everything will be covered, you should take a look over the very handy Dynamic Actions as well.
Flow
Flow has been solving complex requirements ever since its inception, and now this continues in Lightning. With the flow component, you can add Screen Flows as a visual process, giving your users the ability to have a wizard style component that can walk them through a step-by-step process that just became much easier!
Anyone familiar with flow knows how effective this feature is to take automation to the next level. Below is a simple Contact creation example, added to an App’s Home Page. Also, there’s no better time than now to explore Screen Flows – check out our interactive tutorial on how to create this flow here.
Rich Text
A simplistic but potentially powerful component. Rich text simply allows you to input a combination of text, images and hyperlinks into a box that can be displayed anywhere you see fit on the Lightning page. This is extremely powerful with the All Dynamic Components feature that allows you to show/hide components based on record field data.
List View
Another great component that is effective to add on a home page or app page: a list view. This can provide a list of dynamic records with a fixed list view for different users.
Path
The path component is probably something all of you veteran lightning users are familiar with, as it features on the Opportunity page even in playgrounds. The path component gives users a way to visually see how far along a certain process a record is, whilst showing helpful instructions and fields along the way (Guidance for Success and Key Fields).
It’s used within Opportunities to show how far through a sales process a deal is, but it can be applied to other objects as well. Path is really easy to implement, try it here with this tutorial.
Tabs and Accordion
A very interesting and high potential component that allows you to add a tab interface to your record pages. You are probably already pretty familiar with this component as a tab like interface is available on most objects. You can use the Tabs component to create your own structure for the other components which are on the page and add as many components as you like to each one.
To take it one step further, and definitely something which I wanted to test out for a long time, is having more of these components cascading down. If this approach fits your use case, keep in mind that it’s definitely possible, even though five layers might be a bit too much of a Tab-ception.
Similar to the Tabs component, the Accordion one is extremely useful to declutter the record pages, while still letting users know what resides under each of the sections – with the option to choose the default section to be expanded. Why not hide some handy Dynamic Related lists users can access as needed?
Items to Approve
This is a great component to add to the home pages of individuals that have to approve steps in an approval process. Can also be added to its own custom app page as demonstrated below.
Quip
Finally last but definitely not least, we have the Quip components, which are the perfect help to easily enable your users to leverage the bi-directional sync between their Quip documents and Salesforce records, along with most Quip functionality without leaving Salesforce.
For example, you can use the Quip Document component to either display a document containing training resources, or even better, display a predefined template your users can generate documents from to ensure consistency. Note that an URL field will be required for this component’s setup – which you can create directly from the component’s setup!
Find out all the details about the Quip Light Components from the official documentation.
Summary
I hope this article has been informative and you have discovered a few new components you haven’t thought about using before!
What combinations of components have you used to create something amazing? Let us know in the comments below!
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