Lightning Components

What is Salesforce Lightning?

Lightning is the collection of tools and technologies behind a significant upgrade to the Salesforce platform.

Lightning includes:

• Experience: A set of modern user interfaces optimized for speed. This includes the Lightning Experience, Salesforce1 Mobile app and template-based communities.
• Lightning Component Framework: A JavaScript framework and set of standard components that allow you to build reusable components to customize the Lightning Experience, Salesforce1 Mobile app and template-based communities and build your own standalone apps.
• Visual Building Tools: Drag-and-drop technologies for fast and easy app building & customizations. Use the Lightning App Builder to customize the Lightning Experience and Salesforce1 Mobile app. Use the Community Builder to customize template-based communities.
• Lightning Exchange: A section of the AppExchange where you can find 70+ partner components to jumpstart your development.
• Lightning Design System: Style guides and modern enterprise UX best practices to build pixel perfect apps that match the look and feel of the Lightning Experience and Salesforce1 Mobile app.

What are the tools included in lightning ?

Lightning Component Framework – Components and extensions that allow you to build reusable components, customize the Salesforce1 Mobile App, and build standalone apps.

Lightning App Builder – A new UI tool that lets you build apps lightning fast, using components provided by Salesforce and platform developers.

Lightning Connect – An integration tool that makes it easier for your Force.com app to consume data from any external source that conforms to the OData spec.

Lightning Process Builder – A UI tool for visualizing and creating automated business processes.

Lightning Schema Builder – A UI tool for viewing and creating objects, fields, and relationships.

What is Aura? Why do I see the aura: namespace in the code?

Aura is the open source technology that powers Lightning Components. The aura: namespace contains all of the basic building blocks for defining components and applications.

Is Lightning an MVC framework?

No, it’s a component-based framework.

What is difference between Visualforce Components and Lightning Components?

Visualforce components are page-centric and most of the work is done on the server. Lightning is designed from the component up, rather than having the concept of a page as its fundamental unit. Lightning Components are client-side centric, which makes them more dynamic and mobile-friendly.

Where we can display the lightning component?

There are a number of possibilities for displaying lightning components..

• Lightning Experience: We can display components in the Lightning Experience using the App Builder. We can edit the home page, edit a record detail page or create/edit a new app page to include it.
• Salesforce1 Mobile app: We can display components in the Salesforce1 Mobile app by creating a custom Lightning tab that references it and adding that tab in mobile navigation.
• Standalone Lightning app: By create a standalone Lightning app (e.g. myapp.app) and include component in this app. Access Lightning app by URL.
• Add Apps to the Lightning Experience App Launcher: Your Lightning Components apps and custom tabs are available from the App Launcher.
• Add Apps to Lightning Experience and Salesforce App Navigation: You can add Lightning components tabs to an app and they display as items in the app’s navigation bar.
• Lightning App Builder and Community Builder : We can display component in template-based (e.g. Napili) community using the Community Builder. Build custom user interfaces using your own Lightning components, or those you install from AppExchange, for desktop and mobile devices.
• Add Lightning Components to Lightning Pages: A Lightning Page is a custom layout that lets you design pages for use in the Salesforce mobile app or in Lightning Experience. You can use a Lightning Page to create an app home page and add your favorite Lightning component, such as the Expenses app we’ll be creating in this module, to it.
• Add Lightning Components to Lightning Experience Record Pages: You can customize Lightning Experience record pages by adding a Lightning Component. Launch a Lightning Component as a Quick Action: Create actions using a Lightning component, and then add the action to an object’s page layout to make it instantly accessible from a record page.
• Create Stand-Alone Apps: A standalone app comprises components that use your Salesforce data and can be used independently from the standard Salesforce environment.
• Run Lightning Components Apps Inside Visualforce Pages: Add Lightning components to your Visualforce pages to combine features you’ve built using both solutions. Implement new functionality using Lightning components and then use it with existing Visualforce pages.
• Run Lightning Components Apps on Other Platforms with Lightning Out: Lightning Out is a feature that extends Lightning apps. It acts as a bridge to surface Lightning components in any remote web container. This means you can use your Lightning components inside of an external site (for example, Sharepoint or SAP), or even elsewhere on the platform such as on Heroku.
• Customize Flow Screens: Create a flow to guide your users through a business process. You can add simple fields like inputs or radio buttons to a flow screen by default. But with a custom Lightning component, you can fully customize the look and feel and functionality of your screen.

What are the different Lightning component bundles?

• Component :UI for lightning component,
• Controller: Contains client-side controller methods to handle events in the component.
• Helper: JavaScript functions that can be called from any JavaScript code in a component’s bundle
• Style: Contains styles for the component.
• Document: A description, sample code, and one or multiple references to example components
• Design: File required for components used in Lightning App Builder, Lightning pages, or Community Builder.
• SVG: Custom icon resource for components used in the Lightning App Builder or Community Builder.
• Renderer: Client-side renderer to override default rendering for a component.

Click Here for official Salesforce documentation.

What is Lightning Experience?

Lightning Experience is the name for the all-new Salesforce desktop app, with new features, built with a modern user interface and optimized for speed.

What is Lightning Design System?

Salesforce Lightning Design System, or SLDS for short, is the framework behind the look and feel of Salesforce Lightning. Style guides and modern enterprise UX best practices to build pixel-perfect apps that match the look and feel of the Lightning Experience and Salesforce1 Mobile app. it provides which allows us to easily implement consistent styles within components. Click Here for Salesforce official link

What data types can we use within Lightning components?

Within Aura components, we can use any of the basic data types, e.g. String, Boolean, Date, Object etc and arrays of those datatypes. We can also define Aura attributes to hold SObjects and move advanced datatypes such as functions, Apex defined datatypes and we can define an attribute that can store other components.

In LWC, things are a lot more straightforward, since we do not need to define data types on our attributes. This means that an attribute of an LWC can hold any JavaScript data type – for example, we can hold all the standard data types, functions, HTML Nodes, Promises and anything else that we may require.