Form & Embedding Support
Components for embedding help into forms or pages, including field-level help, enabling modes (e.g., Help Enable), and custom backgrounds for layouts.
Use Auto-form to provide a record Detail view with embedded field-level help features.
The Improved Help Auto-form component can be used instead of, or as a compliment to, the standard Salesforce record details component.
The Auto-form offers the following significant advantages:
- Field-level Help: provides help on demand, in a variety of callout templates, as chosen by the Help Author to suit the specific need (and optionally data-driven).
- Field list filter: to show only those fields that need to be edited in a specific situation (can be data-driven).
- Guides: to highlight specific fields for orientation and/or data-entry use cases.
- For Help Authors:
- Edit Mode: provides in-place editing.
- Point and click Help-Enabling and Guide-Enabling modes, allowing non-technical Help Authors to create and embed rich help and training materials for their users without the need for development skills or System Administrator input.
- Statistics mode: Interaction monitoring (e.g., who has viewed / voted / commented on articular Topics);
- Personal Form: enable optional, read-only, 'personal highlights panel' copying user-selected fields at the top of their Autoform. Personal form definition data is stored as Help Interaction records, allowing Help Analysts to understand in new ways which fields end users find most useful.
Best Used For/Key Features:
- Rich field help
- In-page walk-throughs
- Dynamic data-driven forms in flow screens
- Custom key-field styling
- Onboarding / 'Help for this record'
Admin Insights & Deployment Tips: Drop in place of 'Details' or on a 'Page Help' tab; supports pop-ups and field styling; works well with Flows and Experience Cloud.
Example Use Cases:
- Guided Opportunity creation with inline field tips
- Dynamic form for Case intake
Expected Business Outcomes:
- Improved data accuracy
- Faster onboarding
- Seamless Classic-Lightning transition
Controls whether form sections are expanded or collapsed when first visited by a user, prior to them opening/closing sections as they wish. As users expand and collapse sections, their state is recorded for the current object type in Help Interaction records and their personal settings restored on the basis of these on subsequent page visits.
Controls how to display callouts when Help icons are clicked if the Autoform has been configured to show embedded Help (i.e., Callout Option is set to "Topic Selected Event plus Topic view").
- Embedded: opens a space below the Help icon and displays the Topic in its Callout form within it.
- Full: hides the Autoform and shows the entire Topic instead, with a 'Back' button allowing the user to return to the Autoform when ready.
Embedded mode uses a Visualforce page to display Topic content, whereas in Full mode, a Lightning component (the Topic Viewer) is used.
For use cases involving adding new records only, ID of the Record Type to create In general, this attribute will be populated automatically.
Contact Support for more information in the limited circumstances where it might be necessary to supply a specific value manually.
Hides the accordion area used to present the listing of Guides available for the current record. Set to true (checked) to prevent the accordion area towards the top of the Autoform from appearing. This may be desired in cases where Guides are not anticipated and it is therefore desirable to present the user with a simplified user interface.
Controls whether or not in-line editing is permitted. Set to true (checked) to stop in-line editing tools (pencil icons) being displayed next to editable fields, effectively preventing record edits.
Controls the action to take after successfully saving a record via the Auto-form. One can choose to simply report successful saving, or to navigate the entire page to the saved record.
Controls how to respond to helped item clicks: the component can open a callout in-place, or simply raise a Topic Selected event to which other components, such as Help’s Topic Viewer, can be made to respond (e.g., by displaying the relevant Help Topic).
Can be used to limit the fields to display on the Autoform. Enter a comma-separated list of field API names to display only those fields, if permitted by the page layout in use.
Can be used to set default field values when adding new records. Enter[Field API Name] ¬ [Field Value] |to default fields when adding new records.
The number of form sections to display when first loading the page. Set a lower number to improve loading speed on lengthy forms. Set to zero to load all sections. Regardless of the value specified, all sections will be rendered as soon as the user mouses over the form.
These settings can be used to hard-wire the form to use a particular, named page layout for a named object. This can be useful if using the form on custom page layouts.
More usually, these fields should be left blank, in which case Improved Help will detect the record type and user profile being used and display the appropriate, allocated page layout.
Both values must be specified if either are non-blank. Object API Name should be set to the API name of the object whose data form is to be displayed. In-built, locally defined and packaged custom objects are supported. Layout Name must follow a precise formula, whose general form is: [object API name]-[object namespace]__[Layout plain English name]
For example:
Standard objects: Account-Account Layout
Local custom objects: MyLocalObject__c-My Locally defined object (Sales) Layout
Object and Layout from a managed package, whose namespace is “ZZZ”, with a packaged layout called Main User Page: ZZZ__SomePackagedObjectName__c-ZZZ__Main User Page
Object and Layout from a managed package, whose namespace is “ZZZ”, with a locally defined layout called “Main User Page”:ZZZ__SomePackagedObjectName__c-Main User Page
Decorate custom page layouts with suitable background images that act as static or scrolling wallpaper.
Amount in pixels by which to displace content appearing on top of the background image vertically. By design, the background image essentially occupies no vertical space within its column: other components placed in the same column appear directly over the background. The Vertical Displacement figure pushes overlying components in the same page layout column down the screen by the specified pixel amount.
Controls whether the image grows to fill available space.
- Stretch to fill: the image will expand in correct aspect ratio to fill the space, as defined by Component Height and other sizing attributes.
- Original size: the image will display at its native size, even if more space is available to it.
Time interval (milliseconds) at which the image will refresh / resize itself in the event that the user's viewport (screen) size changes. This attribute is only applicable when Wallpaper Coverage is set to Containing Column. The image will attempt to resize itself to the appropriate column width if and when the user's viewport size changes at the specified checking interval.
Controls how the background image behaves if the page is taller than the user's viewport (screen). If the contents of the layout featuring this component is taller than the user's screen, they will be able to scroll up and down the page to view all available material. The Image Positioning attribute controls how the background image behaves in these cases:
- Fixed: the image remains static as the user scrolls up and down their page.
- Scrolling: the image moves with page content as the user scrolls.
Controls whether to 'tile' the image vertically and / or horizontally. Select from:
- None: Image will not tile and will appear only once.
- Horizontal: Image may repeat horizontally to fill the space available, which may be the width of the containing column or page width depending on the Wallpaper Coverage setting.
- Vertical: Image may tile vertically, to fill the space available as set by the Component Height attribute.
- Both: Image may tile horizontally and vertically.
Controls whether the background is allowed to 'escape' its containing column. Select from:
- Containing column: background image is constrained to a maximum width matching that of the column of the page layout into which the component was placed.
- Screen width: the background image may (depending on source and related sizing attributes) grow wider than its containing column, extending as far the right-hand side of the screen.
URL of the image to be used as a background. Any valid full or relative path to an image that will be accesible to your end users may be specified.
These attributes can be used to offset the background image within its container. This can be useful for precise positioning beneath other components on the page layout.
Display height for this component. Enter an integer representing height in pixels. Note that, unlike certain other components, one cannot set 100 percent height using -1 or "viewport height" (-2): only a fixed pixel height may be specified.