As Visualforce pages are hosted on their own domain, the native pages (Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, etc.) have always remained essentially off-limits. In addition, the standard Salesforce UI is out of bounds for customization. The Home Page component has been our secret weapon in creating extremely creative solutions in Salesforce. The Homepage component was a block of HTML that could be added by the developer/admin and resided on the left-hand pane of the Salesforce interface. As the field was essentially unvalidated, any HTML could be added, including iFrames, Javascript, and CSS. Of note, and incredibly important, is that the homepage components are on the same domain (na1, na2, eu1, ap1, etc.) as native pages. In fact, it is the only location where JS and CSS could be used on this domain. The combination of unfettered JS/CSS and no sandboxing via domain allowed us to change just about anything on the Salesforce interface. It was creative and it was fun.
For Health Market Science, essentially data.com for healthcare providers, we looked to maintain as much parity as possible with data.com. The only serious challenge that we faced was data.com provides a modal for data resolution on top of Contact or Lead native pages. As modals are sandboxed to the domain they are hosted from, eliminating the possibility of using a vf component to launch the modal. However, the Home Page component was our great hack that enabled us to replace a picklist field with our own UI that would pop a modal on top of the Contact or Lead pages. It was slick, elegant, and worked flawlessly. It also was rejected by Security Review. Everything else passed on the first review without issue. Running Javascript on Salesforce’s domain? Forget about it. Wasn’t even a conversation: no way, no how. We quickly rehashed the functionality and passed the next day. However, the hack would work with customizations of a single org, as they are not required to go through Security Review. We could selectively hide tabs, add modals to native pages, etc. And now, it is over. In the summer ’14 release notes, Salesforce is replacing the Home Page component with a rich text editor for the component. No longer can we add iFrames, JS, or CSS to the Salesforce domain. Sad trombone. Thankfully, existing code there will continue to work until Summer 2015. For those of you who have taken advantage of this hack as well, you have a year to re-architect your solution and discover another great hack!
