Have you ever wanted to act on many objects at once inside a Tableau CRM dashboard? Well as of Spring ’21, it’s easy to set up 1 click Mass Actions. Here’s how:
Setting up a Mass Action in Core
Step 1 — Go into Setup UI and find the Object Manager
Step 2 — Select the Object you want to act upon
In my case, I’ll pick Account. Now feel free to add an action here under “Button, Links and Actions”, but I’ll assume you already have some existing actions. Remember, the mass action framework only works with Action types of “Create a Record” or “Update a Record”. All other types will not work.
Step 3 — Go to “Search Layouts for Salesforce Classic” and then select “Edit” under the dropdown menu at the right hand side of “List View”
Step 4 — Add your actions to the list view under the “List View Actions in Lightning Experience” header.
Select your action. Use the right arrow to move it to the selected actions list, and hit save.
Making your action available in Tableau CRM
In order for your action to show up, you need to configure it as part of the field metadata. This is so the UI knows which actions are associated with which fields and how to lookup the ID field if necessary. As of Spring ’21, there are two ways to configure the metadata, the dataset, or the query. We’ll walk through the Query in this guide, but using the dataset is mostly the same, you just need to go to the dataset’s “Edit Page” and click “Configure Actions”. To configure your Action on a query, first open the query in the Explorer UI.
Step 5 — Open in Explorer and Select “Configure Actions” from the dropdown menu on that field
In my case, I’m adding the action directly to the Account ID field.
Step 6 — Specify the record ID field (in this case, the current field) and enable 1 or all actions
Step 7 — Click “Done” and then “Update” to save your changes.
Adding your Action Button to a dashboard
Now that your actions are set-up, you can create an action button!
Step 8 — Drag a Link Widget onto the page(1) (probably close to the widget the button will act on)
Step 9 — Add a label (2), choose “Mass Action” as the “Link to”, select the query that will contain the IDs you want to act on (4), then choose the field on which you configured the action (5), and lastly, choose the action you want this button to perform (6).
Pro Tip: The ID field doesn’t need to be visible to work. Best practice is to hide the ID field. You can do this in the “Advanced IDE”. Select the table and open the IDE. In the Query tab, select the “values” and the array of fields after it, and copy the text. In the Widget tab, find “exploreLink”: true then add a comma and paste your text. Replace “values” with “columns” and delete any fields from the list that you would like to hide. Columns is a way to specify at the widget level, “only show THESE columns, and in THIS order.” similar to “columnMap” for charts.
Act!
Now you’re ready to go. Preview the dashboard to try out your new action. Remember, actions can only work on 100 records at once, so if your query has more IDs than that, it will still only work on the first 100 (but your users will get a warning and be able to view the list of affected IDs).
Advanced Use Case — User Selected Records
This will act on all records (up to 100) in the query results, but what if you want the use to select only some of the records?… Easy! Just add a list picker. One way to do this is group by an ID, then add a string formula for Name, then customize the display text for something like “[Name] ([ID])”. This would give you a picker like the one below.
By allowing this to facet your primary table, if the user selects nothing the table will act on all records, but the user can choose to select some, and only act on those. The picker also has a select all on page feature, so the user can just “opt out” of a few records. I would try to place this near your primary table, perhaps adjacent to the action button, so its purpose is apparent.
Happy Acting!
