A Few Highlights from the Summer 2020 Release

The Summer 2020 release was originally scheduled for May and June, but following the Coronavirus outbreak was delayed into June and July. The new dates are:

Sandbox preview

• May 29-30, 2020

Summer '20 Production release

• June 12
  First Release window
• July 10
  Second Release window
• July 17-18
  Third Release window

To determine which release window applies to your production org go to status.salesforce.com, enter your instance name in the search box and check the Maintenance tab (your instance name is the bit before .salesforce.com in your production URL).

There are over 500 release notes for the Summer 2020 release! Here’s a selection of some of the enhancements which stand out for me.

Dynamic Forms

Page Layouts have always been pretty inflexible in Salesforce, this is about to change with the Summer 20 release which introduces the following enhancements:

• Place fields and sections wherever you want
• Put fields and sections in tabs and accordion components
• Use visibility rules to show and hide fields and sections
• Manage your layouts in the Lightning App Builder without having to go to the page layout

Split List Views

List views now have a new ‘Split View’ as a Display As option. This shows your records in a list on one half of the screen, and the selected record in the detail view on the other half. No more (or at least far less) clicking back and forth from list to detail view, and maybe fewer open tabs...

Full View Layout

As well as the Split view for lists Salesforce have introduced the Full View for record detail pages. Instead of having information grouped into tabs and columns this view shows a detail section and related lists all on one page. For those of us who’ve been around for a while this bears a striking resemblance to detail pages in Salesforce Classic…

New Flow Types for Lightning Flows

The Summer 2020 release brings with it some substantial Lightning Flow enhancements. When creating flows we can now choose from the following options:

• Record Changed Flow
  We no longer have to use Process Builder to invoke a Flow on record save - this is now supported in the Flow itself and fires before the record is saved to the database, rather than after the record is updated or created as with Process Builder.

• Scheduled Flow
  We can now schedule flows to start at specific times and with a set frequency of once, daily or weekly. We can also define filter conditions for records, such that the interview will run only for records matching the filter conditions.

• Platform Event Flow
  We can now trigger Flows when a platform event is received, further reducing the need for Apex or synchronous processing.

Run Flows that Bypass User Permissions

Flows can now be defined to run in system context without sharing, ignoring object permissions and allowing actions to run against records not visible to the running user. When saving a flow click Show Advanced and select ‘System Context Without Sharing—Access All Data’ under How to Run the Flow.