Our forward-looking statement applies to roadmap projections.

Roadmap corresponds to June 2024 projections.

Guide Overview

Looking to build forms on the Salesforce Platform? You’ve got multiple options, spanning the entire low-code to pro-code continuum. Representing low-code, Dynamic Forms in Lightning App Builder and screen flows in Flow Builder. Hanging out in the middle of the continuum is the ability to extend screen flows with LWCs and building customer-facing forms with OmniStudio. And representing pro-code is the LWC framework and its ever-growing library of base components.

Options are great, but how do you determine which one (or which combination) is the right option? That’s where this doc comes in.

• Takeaway #1: When building create/edit/view layouts for Lightning Pages, use Dynamic Forms.
• Takeaway #2: Use Flow to build multi-screen forms. If you need to meet precise UX and branding requirements or have complex data relationships, then layer in LWCs. If you’re an Industries customer, use OmniScript and/or FlexCards.
• Takeaway #3: If you need test automation, start with LWC. You can write unit tests for any LWC, regardless of where you plan to embed it.

This doc focuses on form-building options for working with records in Salesforce. You’ll see a similar assessment, focused on orchestrating automation logic within Salesforce in the Architect’s Guide to Building Record-Triggered Automation on Salesforce.

A bit later, we’ll go into depth on these use cases and more, including how to choose between click-based tools and code-based tools (and when to combine them), but here are the major considerations to start with when choosing between these three options.

• Available: Works fine with basic considerations.
• Not Ideal: Possible but consider an alternative tool.
• Roadmap: Estimated support within the next 12 months (June 2024). See Roadmap Explorer for details.
• Future: Estimated for support beyond our Summer '24 Release (June 2024).
• Not Available: No plans to support this capability within the next twelve months.

tl;dr

Quickly, let’s elaborate on the takeaways and table above.

• If Lightning Pages and Dynamic Forms meet your requirements, use them. That means you need a create or edit form for exactly one object, and you need to control field visibility. If your requirements aren’t met by those constraints, keep reading. Flow, OmniStudio, or LWC will be a better fit.
• If you need additional logic or actions behind the form, use Flow, OmniStudio, or LWC. All three tools offer ways for your solution to do more than create or edit a single record. That “more” might be more advanced logic, such as branching or iteration, and it might be more actions like integrating with external systems, sending emails, or pushing notifications to a user’s mobile app.
• If you’re building a multi-page form or a wizard and don’t have strict UX or branding requirements, start with Flow. Flow provides a linear navigation framework for orchestrating multiple forms together. You could use LWC to construct your own framework for navigating between forms, but we recommend letting Flow do the hard work for you, so that you can focus on the forms themselves instead of worrying about form state.
• If you’re an Industries customer and need pixel-perfect branding or have complex hierarchical data, use OmniScripts and FlexCards. OmniScripts let you design and build consumer-grade forms and components to display your complex data relationships to end users. With document generation tools, rich data transformation capabilities, and complex business rules to store and route complicated logic, OmniStudio can handle almost all Industries use cases.
• Got sophisticated UX requirements? Need to dynamically handle more than visibility? Build that stuff in a LWC or an OmniScript. If your requirements can be achieved with simple theming and column-based layouts, you can build your forms directly in a low-code builder. For more fine-grained control over your form’s style, you’ll need the ultimate flexibility of LWC.

Keep in mind, your choice doesn’t have to be an either/or – you can combine the power of multiple options. For example, if you need both Flow’s built-in navigation system and the full styling flexibility that LWC offers, use them together.

What About Page Layouts?

You may notice that Page Layouts are missing from our comparison in this document. Moving forward, the recommended way to configure record detail pages is Dynamic Forms in Lightning App Builder using Lightning Pages. It’s been a long time since we have enhanced page layouts, and that trend will continue. Here’s why:

• Dynamic Forms are more flexible – you can place fields and sections wherever you want directly in Lightning App Builder, where you can take advantage of sections, tabs, and accordions. And just like you can do with components on the Lightning page, you can control the visibility of your fields and sections without defining multiple page layouts or record types.
• With Accordion and Tab components, you can restrict the amount of fields that are displayed initially. Guess what that means? Faster page load times.
• Layout management is simpler with Lightning Pages, since you can manage everything about your pages from Lightning App Builder – whether that’s the contents of the page or which users have access to the page. It’s no longer necessary to make updates in your page layout to make a change happen in your Lightning page. Not to mention, with the power of component visibility rules, you no longer have to create multiple pages (or page layouts) to control who sees which fields when. And that also means you only need to assign users a Lightning page rather than assigning both a Lightning page and a page layout.

As of the Summer ’23 release, Dynamic Forms still has some limitations. We recommend using Dynamic Forms wherever possible, and falling back to Page Layouts only when necessary. As always, we welcome feedback in the Idea Exchange on the improvements that would be most impactful to your organization.

What About Performance?

Any performance considerations related to Dynamic Forms, screen flows, OmniStudio, and LWC center on what framework those technologies themselves sit on. The ones that are based in LWC (besides, of course, an LWC) are going to outperform ones that are based in Aura. The LWC framework offers better performance because core features are implemented natively in web engines instead of in JavaScript via framework abstractions. If you’re not familiar, give this blog post a read.

Back in 2019, we did a case study comparing the performance of the same functionality in Aura vs. in LWC. As a result of converting DreamHouse from Aura to LWC, not only was the development experience far more aligned with current web front-end development standards and patterns, but the performance gains were significant. Lab measurements showed gains in the range of 2.4 percent to 24.7 percent for cold cache and gains in the range of 31.83 percent to 63.32 percent for warm cache on the same two pages.

Now, which framework are our form technologies using? In other words, which form technologies benefit from this superior performance?

• Dynamic Forms, which is integrated in the Lightning pages metadata, is built on a brand new foundation that uses the LWC stack, which will enable us to implement some long-requested features. Building everything from the ground up takes time, which is why Dynamic Forms currently has some limitations – like standard object and mobile experience support. As a performance bonus, Dynamic Forms uses progressive rendering, which results in improved page load time for pages that have a large number of fields.
• As of Winter ‘23, Screen Flows are built on LWC with most of the individual out-of-the-box components now converted to LWC with the exception of two out-of-the-box components: File Upload and Image. While the Flow team converted the flow runtime client to LWC as well as most of its components, customers still need to convert their Aura screen components to LWC. Not only that, but Salesforce only supports LWC components in the new reactive component framework in screen flows. There is an excellent Trailhead module that explains how to do so: Lightning Web Components for Aura Developers. It goes without saying: If you’re thinking about building a custom component for a screen flow or any other container, always go LWC.
• There are a few versions of OmniStudio available. If you're a long-standing customer, you may be using Angular. We encourage all new customers to start with LWC-based OmniScripts and FlexCards, and for existing customers to migrate off of Angular.
• LWC is built on ... LWC of course. This is a freebie. 🤓

Navigating the Low-Code to Pro-Code Continuum

Most of this doc focuses on helping you understand what functionality and level of customization is possible with Dynamic Forms, screen flows, OmniStudio, and LWC.

• LWC is the most customizable and robust option for building a form, but it has the fewest guardrails in place. It’s up to you to build a component in a way that ensures security and scalability.
• Dynamic Forms is the least flexible, but there are far fewer opportunities for missteps.
• Flow and OmniStudio sit somewhere in the middle – more powerful than Dynamic Forms but not quite at the level of LWC. By the same token, they have fewer guardrails than Dynamic Forms but are harder to break than custom code.

If multiple tools fit the bill, the decision comes down to which tool is the right one for your team. Introducing the Salesforce Architect Decision Guides on the Salesforce Architects blog introduces some aspects to consider when making that decision.

We won’t go into the details of each of those aspects here, but what we will do is interpret them for the specific tools this doc is assessing.

Specialized Skills: How much expertise does your team have in the tools you’re comparing? How many makers are well-versed and familiar with LWC or JavaScript? How about makers who are experts in Flow Builder or have expressed an interest in dipping their toes? Generally speaking, Dynamic Forms and Flow skills are more attainable for a broader population of people who build forms. Dynamic Forms is the most declarative form-building tool and will always be easier to learn than Flow. That said, the Flow team is committed to getting that bar as low as possible. In terms of complexity, OmniStudio sits somewhere between Flow and LWC and offers significant form-building superpowers.

Delegation of Delivery: Just because some of your requirements call for LWC doesn’t mean your entire solution needs to be built with LWC. Consider how you can build your solution modularly, such that the parts that require LWC are coded, and the parts that don’t are built in a low-code solution. Doing so maximizes the efficiency of a diverse team and ensures that each individual is solving problems appropriate for their specialization.

Now let’s talk about Flow and LWC. With the Reactive Screen Components Beta, screen flow components can now talk to each other on the same screen unlocking a whole new tool chest for architects, admins, and developers. Developers can now create purposeful, modular components that can be reused across the organization, boosting productivity for everybody on the team. Developers can focus on solving new challenges and save time by using a mix of standard and custom Flow components to achieve form dynamism. With reactive components coming to Flow, there has never been a more appropriate time to mix Flow and LWC when building your forms.

Maintainability & Long-Term Ownership: If you have a multi-step form, it’s a good idea to start with Flow or a mix of Flow and LWC. If you’ve got a low-code team maintaining the solution, think about how you can make the solution as configurable and extendable as possible for that audience. Whichever tool you choose, organize your solution into composable units to improve maintainability and stability.

Diving Deeper

As promised, let’s start a deep dive into a variety of comparison points and functional differences between Dynamic Forms, Screen Flows, OmniStudio, Screen Flows with embedded LWCs, and the LWC framework itself.

Object Impact

What objects will the form operate against? Just one object? Multiple objects?

If your form operates against a single Salesforce object, any of the tools we’re comparing will work. Things get a little more complicated with cross-object or object-agnostic forms. By object-agnostic, we mean inputs that don’t map to any Salesforce object. Perhaps your form represents a data structure that you’ll send to an external service, like Stripe or DocuSign. Or perhaps you’re using several inputs in your form to calculate a value, and then committing that value to the database.

For both cross-object and object-agnostic forms, Flow and OmniStudio are both solid options. The components available in flow screens are agnostic by nature, so you can choose what to do with that data behind the scenes. For example, use the data entered in one form to create multiple records behind the scenes, or use the data to perform other actions like generating Chatter posts, sending Slack messages, sending emails, or connecting to external services.

OmniStudio takes things a step further and is completely object agnostic — it separates the form a user sees from the underlying data model. Instead, OmniStudio manipulates underlying JSON that then is mapped to Salesforce objects (or external data) using tools like DataRaptor and Integration Procedures. DataRaptor and Integration Procedures are two key components in connecting your OmniStudio forms with data internal and external to Salesforce. Using drag-and-drop elements, you can work with complex hierarchical data in an external system and then transform the data to fit your needs depending on where the data needs to go. They also allow you to use formulas to perform math and logic on arrays, or lists of data, much like Apex.

For simple cases, using existing LWC components, like lightning-record-form, can be a simple way to lower code needed to provide a robust solution. However, for scenarios where multiple objects are involved, Flow provides comprehensive control for all objects and removes the need for developers to traverse complex relationships and dependencies.

Form Scope and Navigation

Do you need a single screen, or will the user need to navigate between multiple screens to complete a task?

If you can get all of your user inputs from a single-screen form, start with Dynamic Forms. While Dynamic Forms in Record Pages can use the Path feature to loosely represent the various stages in your business process, it may not fit the majority of your use cases. If you need more functionality than what Dynamic Forms offers, the choice between Flow, OmniStudio, and LWC depends on a few other questions.

• What skills does your team have? For a more admin-heavy organization, we recommend starting with Flow. If you have Industries solutions, your team is already familiar with OmniStudio, and your project has strict UX requirements, start with OmniStudio.
• Is it OK to display a navigation bar at the bottom of your form? If the screen flow and OmniScript navigation experience is undesirable UX, lean toward LWC.
• What needs to happen behind the form? If you need the behavior to be configurable by an admin, build a flow or — for basic changes like changing field labels — an OmniScript. Otherwise, for complex, multi-object relationships build an OmniScript or LWC.
• If you choose Flow or OmniStudio, you may need to build a LWC anyway to achieve the right UX. If you’re already building a LWC to style your form correctly, consider whether embedding that component in a flow is overkill.

If, on the other hand, your solution looks like a wizard, where the user navigates between multiple screens, consider Flow or OmniStudio. Flows and OmniStudio come with a built-in navigation model, so you don’t have to build and maintain LWCs that are strung together. The navigation is linear in nature, with forward-moving actions, backward-moving actions, and a mechanism for saving the form for later. You can also build a form with non-linear navigation if it suits your purposes. For a great example of that using screen flows, check out the Digital Store Audit package from Salesforce Labs.

OmniStudio offers a key navigational advantage by providing progress indicators from standard navigation that surfaces ‘steps’ in the form. This step view automatically displays where a user is on a given multi-step form. Unlike Flow, it lets users ‘jump’ between screens by clicking on various steps of the form.

Whether you’re building single screen or multi-screen forms, make sure that your forms are streamlined so that they’re easy for your users to navigate.

Location

Where do you want to embed the form?

Since it requires a record context, Dynamic Forms are supported only in Lightning Record pages. However, Dynamic Forms aren’t supported in Experience Cloud pages. This limitation is in place because Experience Cloud doesn't use the underlying framework that Dynamic Forms depends on: Lightning Pages. We are evaluating this as based on requests for Dynamic Forms in Experience Cloud.

Roadmap Note: In Winter '24 Dynamic Forms support will be extended to 600+ Standard Objects on desktop and mobile.

You can build flows that require a record context or flows that work globally. As such, you can embed flows in a variety of locations. For record-contextual flows, that might be a Lightning record page, a Community record page, an object-specific action, or an Actions & Recommendations deployment. For the global flow, that might be the utility bar, other Lightning or Community pages, a snap-in, or an external application. Flows are not currently supported as global actions, but as a workaround you can wrap the flow in an Aura component.

OmniStudio lets you build composable FlexCards and OmniScripts that you can place almost anywhere you can put a Flow. However, while composable, they are not packageable.

LWC supports a high degree of reusability, since you are creating components that can be associated with targets via metadata across Salesforce, Communities, and even in open-source projects. LWC components can also be embedded inside of your own website via Lightning Out. LWCs aren’t currently supported as quick actions (object-specific or global), but as a workaround you can wrap the LWC in an Aura component (much like you can with flows). LWC components can also launch flows with the lightning-flow component.

OmniStudio excels at exposing content to your external sites through the OmniOut feature. With OmniStudio and OmniOut, you can compile your OmniScript forms and FlexCard components into standard components and run them off-platform in third-party sites or apps.

None of the form technologies covered in this doc are officially supported in Mobile SDK templates today. If Mobile SDK is essential to your use case, you’re better off building your form natively in your mobile application or building a Visualforce page, while keeping Salesforce Well-Architected form factor guidance in mind.

Roadmap Note: The Mobile SDK team is actively working on supporting LWCs within Visualforce pages.

Controller

What actions or logic do you want to be performed behind the scenes? What does your data model look like?

Dynamic Forms is perfect if you need to use the values in your form to create or update a record. For any capabilities beyond that, you’ll need to leverage Flow, OmniStudio, or LWC. Those capabilities might include a layer of decisioning or iteration, or the generation of Slack posts or emails using the inputs from the form.

Flow offers standard actions for posting to Slack, sending email, and interacting with Quip documents, so you don’t have to write code for these operations. LWC offers rich interactions with single records and related objects through the use of wire adapters that interact with User Interface API. LWC can also interact with multiple records when using the wire for getListInfoByName.

As mentioned above, OmniStudio uses Integration Procedures and DataRaptor to easily grab and transform data external and internal to Salesforce. It shines in flattening and expanding data sets with various levels of relationships thanks to numerous code-free functions you can use.

Flow, OmniStudio, and LWC all integrate with Apex, so you can easily close any gaps in whichever solution you choose. For example, if you require filtering records from an LWC you can always use the wire adapter for Apex to create complex SOQL queries. If you’re swayed by the click-based story, consider Flow or OmniStudio as viable alternatives to an Apex controller for your server-side needs.

A secondary question here is whether you want to immediately commit actions, or defer them to a particular part of your form. This is especially relevant if you’re in a multi-page form. This is especially relevant if you’re in a multi-page form. Flow makes it easy to combine inputs from multiple forms (flow screens) and use them much later in the wizard (flow) to perform some operations. In fact, we recommend designing flows in just that way — perform actions at the end — in case the user bounces back and forth between screens, changing their answers.

Do you need to control which operations occur in which transaction?

Transactions and governor limits are a way of life on the Salesforce Platform. If your use case is fairly simple, it may not be as important to control what transaction a particular operation occurs in. However, there are a few use cases where you might want to combine multiple operations into a single transaction rather than performing them across multiple transactions. Some examples:

• To Rollback Or Not to Rollback: That is the question. Let’s say your form creates multiple records behind the scenes. If the third record fails to be created, should the first two records be rolled back? If each of your actions are independent of each other, feel free to execute them in separate transactions. If they’re dependent, however, and you want the failure of one to also rollback the others, implement them in a single transaction. If your form is in Flow, you can use the Rollback element in a Fault path to roll back your transaction and ensure data integrity.
• Downstream Impact on Governor Limits: Especially when your form creates or updates a record, consider what the downstream implications of that operation are. What processes, workflow rules, flow triggers, Apex triggers, or other items in the save order are going to fire based on this record change? And how do those collective changes impact the governor limits being consumed in that transaction? If a particular record change will result in a lot of downstream changes that impact your limits, consider isolating that record change into its own transaction.
• Batch Processing: Even in a UI context, you may need to batch multiple updates together. Let’s say your multi-screen form iterates over a large group of records. Rather than committing a record update after each screen, wait until you’ve collected the updates for all of the records and then submit one request to update all the records.

When you use a Dynamic Form to create or edit a record, you’re only ever performing one operation, and that operation is always the start of a net-new transaction.

When building a screen flow, you have significant control over what happens in a given transaction. Screens and Local Actions act as boundaries between transactions. Here’s a high-level summary of how transactions are managed in the screen flow architecture.

1. The end user interacts with a screen, and then clicks Next.
2. The client posts a request to the API with the inputs.
3. The API receives the request, and a transaction and database connection are opened. The API then calls the Flow engine to invoke the request.
4. The Flow engine takes over and follows the appropriate path in the flow definition — until it hits a Screen or Local Action node. The engine then returns information about that node to the API.
5. The API creates a response object that contains the details of the next screen to render, and returns that object to the client. At this point, database changes are committed (cue the save order execution), and the database connection and transaction are closed.
6. The client uses the API response to render the next screen for the user to interact with.
7. Repeat from step 1.

In other words, screens “break” transactions. When that happens, any pending actions or DML are committed, the prior transaction is closed, and a new transaction starts.

The right design — which operations you group into a given transaction — is your call. Let's walk through some examples.

On the left, you can see a flow that collects inputs across multiple screens, and then performs several actions in one transaction.

The flow on the right performs each operation in a separate transaction.

The Flow team recently introduced a new element: Roll Back Records. This element enables you to roll back an entire transaction if a single operation fails in a series of database operations.

Suppose you have a Flow that creates records, updates records, then creates more records — as illustrated in the next flow on the right.

In this scenario, if the first two elements succeed and the last fails, the first two DML operations will still create and update those records while the third will not.

By using the Roll Back Records element, you can ensure the entire transaction is rolled back if all three operations have to occur in tandem — as seen in the final flow on the left.

For more details, check out Flows in Transactions and Flow Bulkification in Transactions. The Automated section of Salesforce Well-Architected also goes into more depth about this in Data Handling.

Your ability to control the transaction from an LWC comes down to the underlying services that LWC is using to perform its operations. If you’re using the lightning-record-form base component, the underlying operation (creating or updating the record) happens in a standalone transaction as soon as the form is submitted.

In general, these rules apply:

• Each UI API call is isolated into its own transaction.
• If you need to perform multiple operations within a single transaction, send the inputs off to a server-side technology, such as an Apex controller or a flow. The regular transaction rules for that technology apply.

Do you need to integrate with external systems?

Flow, OmniStudio, and LWC all support platform event (for event-driven architecture) and API integrations. In addition to custom Apex code, both Flow and OmniStudio support declaratively mechanisms to integrate an API.

• If you need to connect to a Mulesoft API or RPA bot, use Mulesoft Services. This generates an External Service.
• If the API has an OpenAPI schema, create an External Service.
• Otherwise, use the HTTP Callout feature in Flow or HTTP Action in OmniStudio. Flow’s HTTP Callout is powered by External Services.

OmniStudio features a rich set of integration capabilities that can call out to external systems with Integration Procedures and transform the data with DataRaptor.

Regardless of whether you implement it with custom Apex or an external service, a callout is a callout. Here’s what you need to know.

1. A callout can take a long time.
2. When a callout is executed synchronously, it's performed while a database transaction is open.
3. Salesforce doesn't let you keep a database transaction open if you have pending database operations.

The main limitation to keep in mind is the danger of so-called dirty transaction, where you perform a create, update, or delete operation and then, in the same transaction, execute a callout. This pattern isn’t allowed because of consideration #3 above, which of course exists because of considerations #1 and #2.

In Flow, you can work around this limitation by breaking the transaction. Remember that screens and local actions both reintroduce the browser context, which breaks the transaction. Although you could use screens and local actions when working with external callouts, we recommend enabling Transaction Control in invocable advanced settings. Transaction Control is a feature of invocable actions that lets you automatically end the transaction before a callout is made. You can enable Transaction Control by selecting Always Start a New Transaction in the Advanced section of an invoked action.

The impact of callouts on the transaction is less complicated with LWC. Generally speaking, you’ll perform your data operations using the Lightning Data Service (LDS), and then use an Apex controller to make the external callout. This design protects you from dirty transactions, since the LDS call is isolated in its own transaction separate from the Apex callout.

For more in-depth guidance about Apex Callouts, External Services and data integration capabilities in general, see the Architect's Guide to Data Integration with Salesforce.

What are your requirements for reusability and modularity?

Dynamic Forms doesn’t support reuse. Each Dynamic Form is tied to a specific Lightning record page for a specific object (though you can assign that Lightning record page to multiple apps, profiles, and so on).

Much like you can write libraries, utilities, and components that are intended to be used across multiple other components, you can apply similar design patterns when creating flows with the power of subflows. Save your flows in smaller, more modular buckets, and then call them from other flows by using the Subflow element. If your design calls for it, you can build a flow that both stands on its own and is useful as a subflow of another one.

OmniStudio is inherently built for modularity. DataRaptors, OmniScripts, FlexCards, and Integration Procedures are all built independently, and can work interchangeably. On top of that, FlexCards can be built as LWC components that are embeddable in other LWCs, OmniScripts, record pages, and Experience Sites.

Screen flows, OmniScripts, and LWCs can all be built for reuse and embedded in a variety of locations including external sites and Lightning Out applications. When you design your solutions to be composable you get additional benefits like adaptability and stability.

Validation

What are your validation requirements?

All technologies that are used to create or update a record adhere to system-level validation – whether those are classic validation rules or custom validation built into an Apex trigger. No matter what technology you use to perform a record change, every change goes through the save order. That means in addition to validation rules, the record change is processed by any number of before- or after-save flows, before or after triggers, escalation rules, assignment rules, and more. If you haven’t already, be sure to bookmark and familiarize yourself with the Apex order of execution.

Inputs on a flow screen or OmniScript step are by nature unbound, so the form itself doesn’t natively adhere to system-level validation associated with a particular object. Whatever values you use to create or update records, however, are processed by the save order, which means they pass through the object’s system-level validation. Note, though, that not all screen flow components support input validation.

Just like page layouts, Dynamic Forms lets you set requiredness and read-only state at the page level. However, you can’t override system-level settings.

Flow provides flexibility for customizing validation on a form’s inputs. While some checks are performed in the client (like flagging missing required fields or incompatible values), none of the client-side validation blocks the user from trying to navigate. The real validation happens on the server. When a user clicks Next, Flow sends the inputs to the server for validation. If any inputs are returned as invalid, navigation is blocked and the appropriate error is displayed. The server validates the inputs by checking:

1. The input’s requiredness setting, or whether the entered value is compatible with the underlying data type.
2. Custom validation on that input: Several standard components (Checkbox, Currency, Date, Date/Time, Long Text Area, Number, Password, and Text) support custom validation on a per-screen basis. Supply a Boolean formula expression and an error message to display when the formula expression isn’t met.
3. Custom validation on the underlying component: If you’re building a custom LWC for a flow, add your own validation code to the validate() method.

OmniStudio features rich error and validation handling via the Set Error action in combination with Conditional Views and the Messaging component.

On the LWC side, most base components perform their own client-side validations. For example, lightning-record-form respects system-level requiredness, but not page-level requiredness. For your custom components, you can build your own validation mechanisms.

Fields that require users to input data should appear early in your forms. Whenever possible, validate user inputs on the client side before forms are submitted. For more best practices on streamlining your forms, see the forms guidance in the Engaging section of Salesforce Well-Architected.

Security

What are your security requirements? Should the form check the user’s access before performing certain operations? Should you sanitize user inputs?

Do your users have field-level security to see this field? Do they have permission to create records for this object? What about access to this specific record, based on your org’s sharing rules? When something runs in user context, Salesforce enforces those access checks. Users can run a case update form only if they have the ability to update cases, the appropriate field-level security, and access to the record in question.

But what if you don’t want to grant users a particular permission? What if you want users to be able to perform a particular operation when they're using your form, but not through any other form or interaction? That’s where system context comes in. System context is a way to elevate the running user’s permissions for the duration of the session, so that the user doesn’t need, for example, Update access to the Case object to successfully complete your case update form. This is especially useful for unauthenticated communities. Instead of granting guest users potentially dangerous abilities, set your form to run in system context. Of course, system context is a double-edged sword and you should use it only when necessary. When a form runs in system context, every single CRUD operation bypasses object- and field-level security and sharing — not just the specific operation you care about.

Note that system context has no bearing on who Salesforce considers the actor – the name you see in the Last Modified By field. For each operation that your form performs, such as the case update, the actor is the running user even if the form runs in a different context.

• Dynamic Forms, OmniScripts, and LWCs always run in user context, and there’s no way to override this behavior.

• Screen flows run in user context by default, but you can set them to run in system context. It’s your choice whether the flow should grant access to all data or if it should still enforce record-level access like sharing.

  • If you embed a Lightning component in a flow that runs in system context, the flow doesn’t override the component’s context. If you need to bypass user access checks, we recommend using the flow to perform those operations and pass the appropriate data into or out of the Lightning component. Some out-of-the-box components (such as Lookup) cannot operate in system context.

  • If your flow calls Apex actions, there are some more nuances to understand. If the Apex class is set to inherited sharing, it runs in system context with sharing no matter what the flow is set to. If the class has no explicit sharing declaration, it runs in system context without sharing no matter what the flow is set to. If the class is set to with sharing or without sharing, it does so and overrides the flow's context.

Querying for Records in Flow in System Context with Experience Sites: If you’re running a Flow in system context on an Experience Site, especially unauthenticated, we recommend only storing specific fields in your Get Records elements. When you pass the results of a Get Records element into a subflow, invocable action, or a Lightning Component, all fields from that object can be inspected from the browser’s developer tools. This might make fields available to your Experience Site users you may not intend. By specifying specific fields in your Get Records, you can ensure only the right fields are exposed even with system context enabled.

Sanitizing Inputs: To protect your org from bad actors, also consider input sanitization. Suppose you have an input on a publicly accessible form that could be mapped to a Rich Text field in your org. You may want to consider automation that strips out any HTML that could hide malicious URLs. In general, it’s not ideal to implement this sanitization at the form level, because you could have any number of sources write to these fields. We recommend creating a Fast Field Update Flow (Before Save) or use an existing Apex Trigger on the object to strip out or modify any potential HTML that might be entered in the form.

Best practices:

• Leave the flow to run in its default context unless you need to elevate the running user’s access for a specific operation.
• Avoid running flows in system context for guest users for security reasons. Create permission sets with limited field access assigned to the Experience site’s guest user profile instead.
• When querying for records in system context-run Flows on experience sites, only store the fields you need in your Get Records element or Invocable Actions.
• If the flow performs a variety of operations and not all of them require elevated access, use a subflow to isolate the operations that should run in system context.
• If you plan to embed a form in an external webpage, consider sanitizing user inputs to remove HTML using a Fast Field Update Flow or Apex Trigger if they will eventually be mapped to Rich Text fields to prevent any potential phishing attacks from bad actors.

Additional Notes:

• OmniScripts, FlexCards, and LWCs run in user context by default.
• LWCs run in user context by default and Flows run in user context but you can override that in an Apex controller.
• Operations performed through the UI API are run in user context.
• Operations performed through an Apex controller depend on that class. To perform those operations in system mode, set the Apex class to with sharing or without sharing.

Do you want to control who can access the form?

If you need control over who can access your form, you can often look to the container you’re embedding your form in. For example, you can assign Lightning pages to be available for particular apps, record types, or profiles. If particular inputs in your form are sensitive, use visibility rules to further control what is displayed to whom – this feature applies to both Dynamic Forms and screen flows.

You can restrict a flow to particular profiles or permission sets, much like you can an Apex class or Visualforce page. By default, flows are unrestricted, which means that any user with the Run Flows user permission can run them.

For more details and best practices on guest user permissions see:

• Guest User Record Access Best Practices
• Develop Secure Sites: Authenticated and Guest Users

Best Practices:

• If you’re exposing a flow to guest users, grant the guest user profile access to only the flows they need. It is possible to add Run Flows to the guest user profile but we consider that a dangerous practice.
• Be especially careful with flows that operate in system context. We strongly recommend you restrict those flows to a particular set of users, since they have fewer checks and balances in place to protect your data.

For LWCs, you can check the running user’s permission assignments to confirm if they have a particular standard or custom permission. Directly from JavaScript, you can import Salesforce permissions from the @salesforce/userPermission and @salesforce/customPermission scoped modules. Or you can use Apex to check the same.

Do you want to control where the form can be embedded?

Once a screen flow is activated, it’s available in all the locations that screen flows are supported, regardless of whether you intended it to be available everywhere or not. That said, Flow Builder supports multiple types of flows that have screens. The bread-and-butter type is Screen Flow, but there are a few other specialized types that are restricted to specific locations. For example, the Field Service Mobile App only supports - you guessed it - Field Service Mobile Flows. The same goes for Contact Request Flows, which are supported only in Experience Cloud.

Regardless of the flow type, the individual making the flow has no control over where the flow can be embedded. The flow will be available in every location supported for that flow type.

While OmniScripts cannot have targets specified like LWC, the FlexCards that can be embedded in them can have valid targets set.

LWCs, on the other hand, are available in a given location only when it’s been added as a valid target. For example, you can make a component available on Record pages and not available as a utility bar item.

Interaction Design

Should your form react dynamically to interactions or conditions?

Static forms are a thing of the past. Today, it’s all about dynamically updating the form with the right properties and values for this user, this time, this place. Let’s talk about what’s possible in this vein for Salesforce’s form-building tools.

Screen Flow interactivity is now a reality thanks to the Reactive Screens effort that is currently in Beta as of Summer ‘23. Reactivity allows individual components on a flow screen to communicate with each other - making screen flows infinitely more powerful.

Execute Off-screen Data Operations: LWC offers a full array of wire adapters that let you access Salesforce data to populate data in your form’s components dynamically, and enables developers to update, delete, and create records through Apex controllers.

Visibility: Visibility can be dynamically controlled in all form building tools. Dynamic Forms, Flow Builder, and OmniStudio address this with Component Visibility features. With this, you can declaratively show or hide fields based on other values on the form or whether the user is on a mobile device or not.

• With Dynamic Forms, visibility can be controlled based on field values of the record itself as well as records related via lookup fields.
• With Flow, you can base a visibility rule on other inputs on the screen, as well as other resources populated earlier in the flow like formulas or values from other records.
  • Device-Based Rules: It’s not obvious from the start, but you can use a formula to show or hide a particular field when the user is on a mobile device. Write a flow formula that checks the value of the $User.UIThemeDisplayed global variable. If the value is Theme4t, the user is on the Salesforce mobile app.
  • Evaluating Other Resources: Manual variable and formula references are evaluated only on the server. So whatever value that resource has when the screen first renders is the value it will have until you navigate to another screen. On navigation, the flow runtime submits a request to the flow engine (the server) and gets back the latest values of the manual variables and formulas. If you expect your visibility rule to update as the user passes through a single screen (for example, onblur), make sure that you’re referencing only values from the other components on the screen.
• With OmniStudio, you can conditionally show or hide components by setting up a Conditional View Property. However, you cannot add more than one conditional view property for an input.

Conditional Input States: If you need to dynamically control any other properties, such as whether a field is required, disabled, or read-only, you have a few options. As expected, LWC gives you full, reactive control over your input state. With the Reactive Flow Components beta, you can dynamically control component attributes like Read Only, Disabled, and Required for standard components that support it, while OmniStudio supports the full spectrum of component-specific attributes. If your requirements dictate that you need Flow, and the component doesn’t support a specific attribute state, you can create an embeddable LWC to achieve a dynamic input state with the Reactive Screen Flows beta enabled.

If you need to dynamically control any other properties, such as whether a field is required or read-only, your best bet in the short term is LWC, where you have full control. That’s especially true if you have bespoke requirements for how to handle onblur or onclick.

Roadmap Note: For Lightning Pages, which includes Dynamic Forms, we anticipate enabling conditional requiredness, conditional formatting, and conditionally setting an input to read-only in the next 12 months. For Flow, you will soon be able to have an LWC component on the same flow screen react to other standard and custom components. We call this Field Reactivity and it is currently planned to go Generally Available in Winter ‘24.

Reactive LWCs in Screen Flows: When building LWCs that can both react to and change other components on a Screen Flow, consult this LWC Best Practices for Screen Flows guide to ensure your components integrate well within the flow runtime engine and work as expected into the future.

Now for custom events. If some of your inputs or the entire form need to communicate with something else in the page, LWC is your only option.

• To communicate within the same DOM tree, use the CustomEvent interface.
• To communicate across the DOM, use Lightning Messaging Service.
• If Lightning Messaging Service isn’t supported for your target container, use the pub/sub module.

For more details, check out Communicate with Events and Communicate Across the DOM in the Lightning Web Components Dev Guide.

For OmniStudio, consult Communicate with OmniScript from a Lightning Web Component.

Styling

How sophisticated is your desired styling and CSS?

FlexCards is the only product covered in this guide that enables you to declaratively control the styling and layout of the UI you’re building in the tool directly – whether that’s the margins and padding, typography, colors, etc.

Both Dynamic Forms and flows respect declarative theming features. If you need control beyond what Salesforce Themes, or Experience Builder Branding Sets, or LWR Experience Sites support, consider a programmatic solution.

For teams that are comfortable working with CSS, you have a couple options:

• Flows and LWCs inherit standard design tokens.
• OmniScripts and FlexCards include support for a customizable design system: Newport.
• With LWC, you can write your own components and fully control the HTML and CSS for them.

Wherever possible, we recommend using themes and design systems, so that your look-and-feel is applied consistently across all of your content.

Reminder: You can embed Lightning components in flows. So if you need pixel-perfect control over the look-and-feel of your form but want to use the other benefits of flows, like the navigation model, you can have the best of both worlds. The same principle applies to OmniScripts and FlexCards.

Layout

What are the layout requirements for your form?

Dynamic Forms supports two-column layouts. Dynamic Forms can be broken up into individual sections with fields. These sections can be placed in components such as tabs and accordions to create easy to use and organized layouts.

Flows can optionally be rendered using the new Section component. With sections, you can add up to four columns and as many sections as you want on the flow screen. The component is also responsive to screen width, so it can work on smaller screens. Lastly, it gives you the ability to apply conditional visibility to the entire section, making it easier to mass-apply visibility to multiple fields within the section. Flow Sections also support column headers and gives an accordion-like experience where users can collapse the entire section by clicking on the label.

OmniScripts feature a variety of layout options for displaying fields and data. You can create sections of data with up to 12 columns including conditionally collapsible accordions.

With LWC, you can use lightning-record-[edit|view]-form and the supporting lightning-[input|output]-field to control layout. The only layout restrictions are those from HTML/CSS. lightning-record-form respects the section configuration in the associated page layout; for example, if a section is two-column in the page layout, it’s two-column in this component.

Translation

Does your form need to be localized to other languages?

If you’ve localized your custom fields, those translated labels are respected on Dynamic Forms. However, localization isn’t supported for labels that you add to components in the same Lightning page. (for example, the label for a tab in the Tabs component).

Roadmap Note: Salesforce is actively working on filling this gap. Soon, you’ll be able to reference Custom Labels for any string or rich text property in Lightning App Builder, such as to localize a custom Tab or Accordion label or the title you added to a Report component.

With the power of Translation Workbench, Flow supports translation of user-facing labels for some, but not all, of the available screen components. For the following screen components, you can localize the label, help text, and error message: Text, Long Text Area, Number, Currency, Checkbox, Radio Buttons, Picklist, Multi-Select Picklist, Checkbox Group, Password, Date, and Date/Time.

The same issue applies for our out-of-the-box actions, like Send Email or Post to Chatter. However, there is a workaround! If you define the translated labels with a Custom Label, you can reference that custom label in the action or component when you configure it in Flow Builder. Create a flow formula that references the custom label, and reference that formula in the appropriate places in your flow.

OmniScripts make use of custom labels for translations. Refer to this help doc to make your OmniScripts multi-language ready.

Now for LWC. Certain base components automatically inherit translations of the associated object’s fields, help text, and validation messages if they’ve been configured in Translation Workbench (for example, lightning-record-form).

If you need to introduce novel translatable labels in your code, Custom Labels are still the unsung hero. Declare the custom label you need, and then import it into your component from the @salesforce/label scoped module.

UI Test Automation

Do you need automated testing?

Consider your requirements for UI test automation.

Unit tests enable more granular automation and validation that works with industry standard CI/CD systems and tools, which can test the components business logic, its JavaScript controller, and its outputs. Going exclusively with low-code you will not be able to self-author tests, but Salesforce rigorously tests our end-to-end offerings.

If your component’s methods are complex enough that you want them to be tested individually, put the methods into dedicated JavaScript files. That way you can import them into a LWC and into a Jest test with something like import { sort } from 'c/utils';.

With end-to-end (for example, Selenium) automation, you can simulate how the user interacts with your form. However, these tests can't verify the outputs of each method being performed. You can write these tests for any standard or custom UI – Lightning pages and screen flows inclusive.

See UI Test Automation on Salesforce for a comparison of the various options you have for building end-to-end automation on Salesforce. Included are considerations for when to use a no-code solution from an ISV, build your own custom test automation solution, or use an open source test framework like Selenium WebDriver or WebdriverIO. These solutions are valid for any UI interaction in Salesforce, whether that’s a Dynamic Form in a Lightning page, a screen flow in a utility bar, or an LWC in a flow in a quick action.

Metrics

Do you need to track usage of your form?

If you need to track overall usage and adoption of your form, start with the low-code tools. Both Dynamic Forms and Screen Flows are trackable using out-of-the-box custom report types, though you’ll get more granularity from the Screen Flow tracking reports. If you need to track usage of a LWC, out-of-the-box availability depends on where you’re using that LWC. If it’s on a Lightning page, whatever is available for tracking Lightning page usage applies to your LWC. The same story goes for LWCs that are embedded in flows.

Dynamic Forms themselves aren’t trackable out-of-the-box, though you can track the usage of the parent Lightning page through Lightning usage objects. To track the standard Lightning pages, use the Users with Lightning Usage by Page Metrics custom report type. For the same on custom Lightning pages, use the Users with Lightning Usage by FlexiPage Metrics custom report type.

For tracking adoption of your specific form (not just the page it lives in), Flow’s got you covered. Use the “Sample Flow Report: Screen Flows” to answer questions like:

• What’s the completion rate for this form? Is it being well-adopted?
• How long does it take users to complete this form?
• Which screen do users spend the most time on?
• How often do users navigate backwards?
• How often do errors occur?

If the standard report doesn’t meet your needs, clone it to make your own changes or build your own from scratch by using the Screen Flows report type.

If you’re using the package-based OmniScript runtime, you can utilize the Vlocity Tracking Service. This service tracks any type of event. For example, you can track the time it takes to complete the steps in an OmniScript to identify process improvements. It’s on the OmniStudio team’s roadmap to support this service in Standard OmniStudio.

To track the same for an LWC that isn’t embedded in a screen flow, OmniScript, or Lightning page, there’s no out-of-the-box option. You can build a custom solution using Apex.

Packaging & Deployment

How do you plan to distribute or deploy your solution?

When you need to deploy your solution to higher environments for testing or deploying to production, you may be used to using change sets or DevOps Center to do so. Dynamic Forms, Flows, and LWCs are fully supported in those deployment options. OmniStudio requires a separate tool: IDX Workbench.

If you are an ISV or partner who plans to package up your solution for distribution on AppExchange, we recommend looking first at Dynamic Forms, Flows, and LWCs. OmniStudio doesn’t support packaging.

Closing Remarks

As an architect, it’s important to have a solid understanding of all the options available to you and how you can apply them in your specific use case. For building forms on Salesforce, the options range from low-code (using Dynamic Forms, in Lightning App Builder and Screen Flows in Flow Builder and OmniScripts in OmniStudio) to pro-code (using the LWC framework), with a combination of screen flows or OmniScripts and LWC in the middle. Keep this guide in mind and use it as a reference when you’re planning to build (or redesign) forms on Salesforce. If you’re looking for guidance on how to design streamlined and helpful forms, consult Salesforce Well-Architected: Engaging.

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