This is more than one suggestion, but all under one banner of “Formula fields are not great”. This is also specifically the experience of building formula/calculated fields in Data Management or for some objects their layout configurators, though there are honorable mentions from other areas.
- Along the same lines as this post, I should be able to add Formula Fields to the Company object in Data Management when I can do it from Customer Data>Company>+Field. Oddly, you can add formula fields to CTAs but I seem to get an error saving them.
- The actual formula build process is bad. Really bad. As just one example, which prompted this, is the Concat function.
- Delimiter values can only be selected from a dropdown of 5 values, there’s no custom option. To get around this, I had to do this jank:
- You can nest functions, but not very many and it’s quite clunky when you do.
- For concat values, you cannot manually add in just a space. You get an error.
- If any of your string values are null (e.g., you selected a field with no data) then the contact doesn’t work. That section just seems to get ignored.
- You can’t determine how many things you concatenate very easily - you can nest things but again, only so far and it’s not at all intuitive and you need an even number.
- Delimiter values can only be selected from a dropdown of 5 values, there’s no custom option. To get around this, I had to do this jank:
- Also the below text isn’t really relevant to all data types:
and flat out doesn’t work for String fields. Even for number fields you have to start a function first. The wording is at best confusing and at worst totally wrong in my experience.
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You can’t access lookups when creating fields, unlike in reports. This makes sense, since you’re not pulling in the related object data the same way as when you open reports but while I’m making demands I might as well mention that it would be nice to have :)
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The UI doesn’t even match Data Management and Customer Data>Company or CTA>Custom Field, even though the functionality appears to be largely the same. They’re also still called Calculated fields.
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Speaking of UI mismatch, the experience of adding a formula field in Report builder was updated, and also doesn’t match the other two previously mentioned areas. The functionality here is largely the same (same problems) though you can get to lookup fields if you expend the lookup first.
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Notably, Horizon Rules has the most up to date Formula Field experience, that matches nowhere else in the platform it seems.
Long shot… but could a string output of a case be part of this “enhancement”?
I remember there was a VCAM about bucketing on the fly (report builder) but an intermediate step could be allowing Advanced Formulas with a String Output? For example, to bucket ARR directly in the Company object using an if/else statement. Eg, if Total Annual recurring <20000 then “Bronze”, if Total Annual recurring >=20000 and Total Annual recurring <100000 then “Silver” else “Gold”. We can do this via Rules Engine, but it would be better if we could do it directly in the object
Similar post:
Long shot… but could a string output of a case be part of this “enhancement”?
I remember there was a VCAM about bucketing on the fly (report builder) but an intermediate step could be allowing Advanced Formulas with a String Output? For example, to bucket ARR directly in the Company object using an if/else statement. Eg, if Total Annual recurring <20000 then “Bronze”, if Total Annual recurring >=20000 and Total Annual recurring <100000 then “Silver” else “Gold”. We can do this via Rules Engine, but it would be better if we could do it directly in the object
So the option for case statements
As always, thanks for the details post@bradley
While we are it, may I highlight how severely restricted is the ability to use case statements in formula fields in data management? What should ideally take me 5-10 mins to do in a formula field, generally takes me anywhere between 30-60 mins to build, test and deploy the same logic via rules
As always, thanks for the details post@bradley
While we are it, may I highlight how severely restricted is the ability to use case statements in formula fields in data management? What should ideally take me 5-10 mins to do in a formula field, generally takes me anywhere between 30-60 mins to build, test and deploy the same logic via rules
We can already do Case statement with advance formula builder on numeric fields only.
Extending even that behavior to strings would save a ton of work for us.