Custom Views on the Home Tab

Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 5:24 pm · Filed under Blog, Tips

One of our clients uses Salesforce to manage their call center. They really wanted a way to display their “Open Cases” view on the Home Tab. In the past, we’ve accomplished this by recreating the view in an s-Control. The problem with that is changes made to the fields displayed in the view on the Cases tab would not be reflected in the s-Control, so it’s not ideal for a dynamic organization.

The consultants at MK Partners put their heads together and came up with a simple yet dynamic solution. We leveraged a Custom HTML Component, an iFrame, and the Console functionality already in Salesforce to allow you to display an existing custom view on the Home Tab. Here’s how we did it:

1. Enable the Console Setup | Customize | Console
2. Create a new Console Layout
3. Add the object whose Custom View you want to use to your new Console Layout
4. Edit your Console Layout Assignment and make sure all your profiles have access to your Console Layout
5. Go to the Console Tab
6. Select the Object and then View you want to add to your Home Tab
7. Right-click anywhere in your View and select This Frame | Show Only This Frame*
8. Copy the URL for the Frame
9. Create a new Home Page Component Setup | Customize | Home | Home Page Component
10. Name it, select the HTML Area type, and click Next
11. Check the Show HTML checkbo
12. Paste the following into the box, replacing [INSERT URL HERE] with the URL from step 8:
<IFRAME src=”[INSERT URL HERE]” frameBorder=0 width=”100%” height=”204″></IFRAME>

13. Save your Component and add it to your Home Page Layout
* This function is available in Firefox

Here’s what it looks like:
Custom View on Home Tab

Some Tips:

* Working with iFrames in HTML components is a pain because you can’t edit them
(the iFrame gets rendered instead of the code being displayed) you’ll
have to delete it and recreate it if you want to make any changes.
* Hyperlinks for fields in the Custom View will open in the iFrame unless you create Formula Fields with the “_top” attribute.

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6 Comments to “Custom Views on the Home Tab”

  1. DavidNo Gravatar Says:
    May 9th, 2008 at 6:33 pm

    Great start. Do you think that the new Summer08 Default Tab feature will fix this, enabling the company to use a custom app that defaults to Console for these users?

  2. mkaufmanNo Gravatar Says:
    May 12th, 2008 at 3:23 pm

    You can already default the Tab you see upon first login, just use a bookmark to any page in Salesforce to login instead of the login.salesforce.com.
    Defaulting to Console is useful in some scenarios but some people still want to see their Task list and Calendar.

  3. ChrisNo Gravatar Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 9:35 am

    This is great. Do you know if there is a way to apply the object’s style sheet, much like we do with an s-control so it fits into the front page UI a little better?

  4. mkaufmanNo Gravatar Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 2:06 pm

    Unfortunately, since this view is actually a native component there is no way to force it to use a css file.

  5. HudiNo Gravatar Says:
    June 19th, 2008 at 2:11 pm

    maybe i’m missing something – but why wouldn’t a dashboard work? with scheduled refresh?

  6. ZackNo Gravatar Says:
    August 7th, 2008 at 9:55 pm

    Doesn’t seem to work when I try it. My URL is valid and I can refresh it directly in FireFox. But as soon as I use it in the IFrame and navigate to the home page I get:

    URL No Longer Exists
    You have attempted to reach a URL that no longer exists on salesforce.com.

    Bummer.

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