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Change Lightning Page Template in Spring 19

Introduction

Sometimes it’s the little things that make all the difference, and in the Spring 19 release of Salesforce there’s a small change that will save me a bunch of time - support for changing the template of a Lightning Page. I seem to spend a huge amount of time recreating Lightning pages once I add a component that needs more room than is available. Often this is historic Bob's fault, because I’ve written a custom component that needs full width, but when I originally created the page I didn’t foresee this and chose a template that is now obviously unsuitable.

Changing Template

Here’s my demo page - as you can see the dashboard is a bit squashed as I’ve gone for main region and sidebar:

Changing template is pretty simple - in the Lightning App builder (it can’t be long before this is renamed the Lightning Page builder can it?) edit the page and find the new option on the right hand side:

Clicking this opens the change template dialog - initially, much like creating a page I get to choose from a list. I’ve gone for header and right sidebar so that my dashboard can take the full width header section:

The next page is a departure from previous experience, in that I need to tell the dialog how to map the components from the old to the new template - I’ve left it as the defaults aside from the main region (which has my dashboard) which I add to the new header region:

Once I’ve saved the page, I can view it and see the dashboard in it’s full width glory:

Deploying Changes

While it’s great that we can do this through the UI, if I change the template of a Lightning Page in a sandbox I’d like to be able to deploy it via the metadata Api to production. When I tried this initially I had my API version set to 44.0 in my package.xml, which meant that I wasn’t hitting the Spring 19 metadata Api, but the Winter 19 version which doesn’t support template changes. Once I updated that, it all worked fine. If you are wondering how I can make such an obvious mistake, allow me to point you at this post, which explains everything.

Related Posts

• Release notes for this feature

 

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