What is the Salesforce List View? Let me explain this with a simple example. Have you ever noticed that when entering Salesforce Accounts, Contacts, or any other tab, Salesforce serves you a list of recently seen records? I hope you noticed this because the recently viewed records are an example of the Salesforce List View. List views are lists of records that could be created on every tab.
The main features related to List Views are as follows:
- There are standard List Views such as Recently Viewed but besides those, you can also create custom list views.
- You can decide which Salesforce fields should be used as columns on the list while displaying this to the users.
- You can set filters to show only records that you want, for example, only records owned by you or records with specific field values, such as Accounts with the billing country as Poland or Spain.
- You can decide who sees the created list views. Different (public) groups, users, or users with specific roles can have their own List Views that are visible only to them, so as to not overcrowd the list views of other users. Finally, you may also create list views that are private, so visible only to you.
Tip
Please consider restricting the permission to create a public list view (yes, such a permission exists in Salesforce and can be revoked from certain users) to Salesforce Admins and Super Users. Granting this capability to every individual user will lead to chaos in the public list views, causing an influx of unnecessary views and user frustration, ultimately resulting in users abandoning this tool. Instead, let Salesforce Admins or business-oriented Super Users, who are closely attuned to the needs and requirements of standard users, manage the list views.
Related lists
Related lists are very similar to List Views, but they always exist in the context of records only. What are Related Lists, then? To describe them, let’s use simple examples of standard related lists:
- List of Contacts related to a specific Account
- List of sales Opportunities related to a specific Account
Both aforementioned related lists can be seen on the Account records UI and show people and deals related to the specific Accounts. While viewing Account X, you will see the list of Contacts and deals related to Account X, while, when viewing Account Y, you will see the Contacts and deals related to Account Y. As simple as that!
The main tasks of Related Lists are as follows:
- Show records related as a child records of the record you’re currently on
- Be able to show filtered records; when using dynamic related lists, you can show only a portion of related records limited by some filter conditions
- Create new child records with the press of a button, just by clicking the New action on the specific related list
- Perform some mass actions on the records displayed on the lists, such as updating or deleting those records