Ultimate Guide for Record Types in Salesforce

As an #AwesomeAdmin, we must ensure a great customization experience for our Users. Record Types is a core topic for an Admin to learn but wondering how?? Then, this blog is for you.  

After this blog, you’ll be able to understand Record Types, their function, their use cases, and finally how can you create one. 

Record Type? What’s this?

Record Type allows specifying a category of records that displays different values of picklists and page layouts. 

• For example, Account objects have ISO and Merchant as their record types. 

What’s the function of Record Types in Salesforce?

• It helps in configuring different business processes, picklist values, and assigning Page Layouts.  
• Record Types in Salesforce can also be linked to the User Profiles. 
• You can apply many Page Layouts for a single object per user profile. 

Don't forget to check out: Create and Insert Record in LWC Without Using record-edit-form | Salesforce Developer Guide

When should I use it? Any sample use cases?

You can use Record Types for many scenarios. Below are some use cases for the same: 

• If you want to show different picklist values as per the requirements. 
• If you want to restrict the creation of a particular type of record using record type assignment and profile. 
• If you want to display different page layouts for a single object according to the requirements. 
• If you have a business requirement to restrict the field access on layouts based on record types and page layouts. 
• If you want to create two different sales processes on the Opportunity object and they both have different sales stages and different Page Layouts. 

How can I create it?

1. From object manager, go to the object for which you want to create Record Types. 
2. Click New. 
3. Select Master from the dropdown list named “Existing Record Type”. 
   1. If you want to copy the values from all available picklists, you can choose an existing record type (such as ISO or Merchant record types in my case) to clone its picklist values. 
4. Enter all the required details. 
   1. Don’t use the “Master” name for record type as it is already reserved for record types. 
5. For objects like the case, opportunity, lead, and solution record types, you need to select a business process for its association with the record type. 
6. Select the “Active” checkbox. 
7. Select the “Make Available” checkbox next to the profile for which you want the record type to be available to users with that profile. To make it available for all profiles, select the “Make Available” checkbox present at the top.  
   1. If every profile is associated with a single record type, then users will not be prompted to select a record type while creating records.  
   2. Users that are assigned to a record type can still edit and view the records associated with record types that are not enabled for their profiles. 
8. If you want to make it the default record type for users of that profile, select the “Make Default” checkbox next to the selected profile.  
9. Click “Next”. 
10. Choose any page layout option as per your need: 
    1. Want to apply only a one-page layout for all profiles? If yes, select the “Apply one layout to all profiles” button and select the page layout from the dropdown list. 
    2. If you want to apply different page layouts based on the user profiles, then select the “Apply a different layout for each profile” button and then select a page layout one by one for each profile. 
11. Click Save 
12. Note: Whenever we create any record type on an object, a new standard record id field is added to its field list.

Check out another amazing blog by Tanya here: Apex Basics and Database | Salesforce Apex Tutorial Guide

With this tutorial, we reach the end of this blog. Hope it helped!