You’re ready to install Conga Composer and start building your solution. Great! Taking time to review some of the best practices below will help ensure your Conga Composer solution is a success.
1. Change the default installation profile access
During the installation of Conga Composer, you will be prompted to select profile access if you have profiles enabled in your Salesforce instance. If possible, change access to “All Users” instead of the “System Administrators Only” default. It is much easier to lock down profile permissions than trying to go back and “unlock” profile permissions. When unlocking profile permissions you encounter field-level security, object permissions and other settings that can be tedious to sort through.
2. Determine the document content
When setting up any solution with Conga Composer, it’s important to first identify what information you want to include in your document. Data location and data relationships often dictate from where your users will launch your solution. You might begin building your solution on Object A, but then realize you need to pull in data from Object D, and no relationship exists between the two objects. Save yourself wasted time and frustration by identifying the information you need ahead of time.
3. Be careful when creating new buttons/links by copying and pasting
Be cautious of spaces that can end up in your custom Conga Composer button/link URL from copying and pasting. Extra spaces will break your URL and result in an error message when you attempt to run the Conga Composer solution. An easy way to check for spaces is to place your cursor at the end of each line of the URL and hit the Backspace key until your cursor is next to the last character in the line of the URL.
4. Use the button/link description
Use the “Description” field when creating a new custom button or link to describe your solution. Doing so allows other individuals to understand what exactly the button or link provides. In the event someone is “cleaning” up the page layout, having a clear description of the button or link can save your button from accidentally ending up on the chopping block. Using the description to outline what your button or link solution entails can also help you to remember what the button or link is for should you forget or go on to build additional buttons or links on the same page layout.
5. Check user profiles/permissions
It takes time to build your solution so be sure your end users have the ability to access the solution. Hopefully you were able to grant access to all users during the installation process (if you have profiles enabled in your Salesforce instance). In the event you missed this step or modified user permissions since installing, you’ll want to consider object permissions, custom tab settings, etc. Users, for example, must have at least “Read” access to the Conga Email Template object if they are using Conga Composer to send out a Conga Email template. For further detail on the necessary permissions/settings, this article is a great reference.
Field- level security is another factor to keep in mind. If you are merging in a field that has visibility defined on select user profiles, the merged document will not show any data from that field if visibility for the field is not enabled on the user’s profile (Enterprise Edition and above). For Professional Edition, this means ensuring that the field is included on the page layout.
If you are using Salesforce reports, be certain your users have profile permissions to “Export Reports” in addition to “Run Reports” and “API Enabled.” If you do not wish to grant these permissions to your users, you can use SOQL Queries as an alternative.
6. Use report/query aliases
If you are adding Salesforce reports or queries to your Conga Composer button/link URL, it’s helpful to provide an alias for the report or query. This allows you to help keep track of what information is contained in your report or query dataset. If someone else takes over or needs to troubleshoot the solution you have created, an alias will help them identify what information corresponds with the various datasets.
If you have other best practices you’ve discovered when building your Conga Compose solution, let us know!