JS for Salesforce Home Page Component

While it's not possible to add a Visualforce page or component to the standard Salesforce home page, it is possible to inject straight HTML and JavaScript into the home page via an HTML Area component. Furthermore, you can use Salesforce's AJAX Toolkit to connect to the API, which opens up a world of dynamic possibilities for your Home tab.

There's only one trick to connecting to the API: You need the current user's session ID. Luckily, this information is stored in the sid cookie and can be retrieved and easily stored in the sforce.connection.sessionId property.


From here, you can use all of the tools in the AJAX Toolkit to bring your data to life on the Home tab.

Extending Chatter Profile with Custom Subtabs

Out of the box, Salesforce only gives users limited access to user information through the Chatter Profile page. There are two tabs: Feed, showing the Chatter feed, and Overview, giving a nice overview of additional Chatter relationships and the ability to edit ~1 dozen User fields. However, organizations that want to extend the Chatter Profile page will not find any button-click admin options in Setup.

Thankfully, custom Profile subtabs give those orgs an option to extend the Chatter Profile without having to completely re-engineer the entire page (which is not really feasible considering the Chatter feed and related components). What's required is some Visualforce magic to expose related information directly on the Chatter Profile page as subsequent tabs coming after "Feed" and "Overview".

To provide access to personal data without exposing that data to other users, Salesforce provides a thoughtful separation of different subtab use cases. Admins have the option of showing custom subtabs in one or more of four different contexts.

• Profile (Others): When a user looks at someone else's profile in the internal Salesforce "community"
• Profile (Self): When a user looks at his/her own profile in the internal Salesforce "community"
• Profile in Communities (Others): When a user looks at someone else's profile in a customer or partner community
• Profile in Communities (Self): When a user looks at his/her own profile in a customer or partner community

Without restrictions on what to extend, subtabs really give developers the ability to deliver any functionality desired within the constraints of Visualforce. And knowing that the profile user's Salesforce ID can be retrieved from the sfdc.userId URL parameter, developers can provide a fully personalized experience for the user.

Secret Search Layout Feature in Salesforce1

If you open an object tab in Salesforce1, you'll probably see something very similar to the screenshot below. A search box. Available list views. Recent items with... a teaser field on each item?

S1 has an interesting feature that enables users to see one field on each recent item on an object tab's home page. This feature appears to be undocumented in either the first version of the Salesforce1 App Developer Guide, or the "Customizing Search Layouts" Help page.

To configure which field appears here, modify the Columns Displayed for the Search Results Search Layout on the object. This is counter-intuitive, because in the browser app the columns displayed for recent items is controlled through the {!ObjectLabel} Tab Search Layout.

Have you found any other hidden configuration options for S1? Please share them in the comments!

P.S. Thank you to Brian Casey for tipping me off to this interesting discovery!