Today we added options to enable record navigation with new buttons: Prev and Next buttons on record preview page, Save and Next button on record edit page and Save and New button on a new record page.
An idea to implement these buttons was added to our Idea Exchange long ago. But until recently we were unable to find right approach to the problem. We thought of on-the-fly calculation of the next and previous record based on current record and view’s filtering criteria and sort order. But it turned out in case of complex filtering and/or sort column the time needed to find the next record is comparable with the time needed to get the whole view. That is up to 30 seconds. Bummer.
Now we have changed the approach and tried to start directly from the view.
How it works
On any record-level view type (Table, Tile, Map, Calendar, Timeline or Kanban) when you click on a View or Edit button, we capture the list of records directly from view and pass the list to a record preview/edit page. An advantage of this approach is there is no need for extra data access. It is not without drawbacks, however.
First, captured list of records is static and if editing of one record leads to removal of the next from the view you won’t see the change in the navigation; but scenario is rare.
Another drawback is as we are capturing the list of (editable) records off the view, Save and Next button won’t be available if the view does not display Edit button.
And the last one is the potential conflict between the Save and New/Next button and the Navigate action in record change triggers. On one side, Save and New/Next clearly indicates where it will navigate and should suppress navigation action. On the other side, navigation action might be critical for the business process and may have some important actions associated with it.
Due to these drawbacks new feature is disabled by default and can be enabled granularly on a per-table per-role basis.
Record navigation setup
In table properties scroll down to User Interface section to find new option flags:
When enabled new buttons are added.
And schematically the navigation is
Have fun!
This is great
It makes data processing much more efficient
Thank you for adding it to Teamdesk… for the same price !
This is unbelievable!! Well done guys: I never thought you will deliver this feature so soon – it is sooooo useful for most of my clients!!! I’ll get the word out to them right away.
Sarcasm detected 🙂 Since it took about the decade to implement Prev/Next. But, well, sometimes that’s what it takes to find the right point of view.
It would be even greater if we could allow the navigation buttons on a per-view basis
We started from a per-view settings, but then unwound it and switched to a per-role setting.
Basically, we could enable it by default everywhere. But with Save and Next/New the showstopper is possible appearance of navigate action in the record change trigger chain. We cannot detect whether the navigation is a mere “suggestion” to the user and can be ignored or it is a crucial part of the workflow. And action execution does not depend on the view; hence we made it role-based.
It would be even greater if we could allow the de navigation buttons on a per-view basis
One issue I have found is that when using SAVE & NEW on a child record e.g. adding an Expense Item to an Expense Form the Expense Form Id is not transferred across to the Expense Id. There is a filter on the record picker for the Expense Id in this example so I don’t know whether that’s causing an issue but the filter is required
Thanks for reporting, should be fixed now.
Could we also have the ability to navigate to the next / previous record as an workflow action.
For instance:
– the user has to process a list of records
– he displays the first record
– he processes the first record with an action button (for instance: validate invoice)
– it would be nice this action button could bring him to the next record. (ie the button would call two actions : 1) validate 2) navigate)
Actually Kirill, there was NO sarcasm intended at all – I only requested this feature a few months ago and was not expecting anything to be delivered so soon, honestly. But now that you mention it, it is true that there was a threat about this functionality from a few years back.
Another suggestion: looks like the PREV/NEXT buttons do not display when a record is viewed from a Details list. This would be very useful. Often users go to a parent record (say a Conference or Class with a list of Participants/Pupils) and need to process all the detailed records one by one. I was hoping that the PREV/NEXT buttons will show for each of the records in the details view (what I call the “Related Records List”, using Salesforce parlance) when one of the records is viewed. But when you open one of the records from that list, the buttons are not displayed 🙁
Could this be implemented too?
An appearance of buttons is controlled on a per-table basis. Please make sure you do enable it for detail table. It should work then.
We found and fixed the bug regarding Prev/Next buttons in detail views. Please try again.