Category: Development

When it comes to writing custom user-interface code in Salesforce, Lightning is where it’s at. You could write it in Visualforce, but sooner or later you’ll have to convert it to Lightning. Lightning provides a far richer experience. It allows you to view related data more easily, and see that data change in real-time.

One headache for developers has been that doing something like writing a component to update values on a Contact would require page markup, Javascript, and Apex. And Salesforce itself did not check whether the current user had the correct permissions to be viewing/editing this data. Security was an extra requirement that could easily be forgotten.

In Visualforce, the same requirements could all be achieved with a small amount of markup, leveraging built-in Visualforce tags.

Well, as of Spring ’18, Lightning can now achieve the same thing. The combination of two new components, lightning:recordEditForm and lightning:inputField handle all the complexity for us, and we can get on with only writing custom code where it really adds value to the business!

Editing a Contact in Lightning is now as simple as:

<lightning:recordEditForm recordId=”0030Y0000080eMuQAI” objectApiName=”Contact”>

<div class=”slds-box slds-theme_default”>

<lightning:messages />

<lightning:inputField fieldName=”Name” />

<lightning:inputField fieldName=”Phone”/>

<lightning:inputField fieldName=”Email” />

<lightning:button class=”slds-m-top_small” variant=”brand” type=”submit” name=”update” label=”Update” />

</div>

</lightning:recordEditForm>

Build Secure and Interactive Forms Faster…No custom JavaScript and no Apex needed!