New URL Change in Lightning in Summer ’18 release

With the new release approaching the readiness for the same should be a priority in every Admin’s mind. With many new changes/additions one of the updates that can affect users in day to day life is the URL change in Lightning Experience and Salesforce Mobile. From the Summer 18 your URL format will change for standard apps, console apps, and the Salesforce mobile app. The change has been done for a good reason of enhancing security and to counter the issue of being directed to an unexpected location. This could lead to many problems like if we think it in a real scenario, you access any link or URL from an app and without any authentication you could be taken to any location or site that may be contain malicious content.

What could affect and what can be done

Before understanding about the what can be done for this, let see what the change will be like for example the below mentioned links will be the old & new format of the URL,

  1. Current format:
    https:// lightning.domain.com/one/one.app/#/sObject/Contact/home
  2. New format:
    https://lightning.domain.com/lightning/o/Contact/home

Therefore any Lightning component that is used in a Salesforce org (including installed if not updated from the vendor’s side) and that parse a URL may not work from the next release and it may break or show unexpected behaviour. This URL change will especially affect the components where window.location or the aura:locationChange event are used and any query string parameters appended to /one/one.app will need to be rewritten and changed in the component.

To get ready for the change we can use the Critical Update Console (CRUC) setting that was provided by Salesforce during the Spring ’18 release. This will allow us to test the new URL format in the production and sandbox orgs. If there are components that you have in your org or you use, then CRUC setting can be used prior to the Summer '18 release to test them in your sandbox environment. After test it in the sandbox org you can similarly use the CRUC to activate the new URL format in your production org. This will allow the uninterrupted access for all users and peace of mind to all the admins.

Useful Information available

For more information on the new CRUC setting, read the release notes To Understand the impact from the change you can look at the dev blog and Knowledge Article. If you need any further information or want to discuss if you need any changes, feel free to contact us.