Get Started with Lightning-Ready Rich Publisher Apps
Learning Objectives
- Describe what Rich Publisher Apps are.
- List some use cases for Rich Publisher Apps.
- Describe the basic architecture of a Rich Publisher App.
Get the Competitive Advantage
Instead of just adding a file or link to your feed post, imagine attaching a live video, an eye-catching GIF, or an interactive widget. With the Rich Publisher Apps platform, just about anything is possible. Use the platform to build, configure, and integrate up to five custom apps into the Chatter publisher. Give your community members the kind of “available right here, right now” convenience that sets you ahead of your competitors.
With Rich Publisher Apps you can:
- Attach a case to a post.
- Insert GIF files or famous quotations.
- Kick off a video meeting.
- Attach a Trailhead module.
- [Your ideas here!]
In this module, you explore how to build a Rich Publisher App to make your feeds more dynamic and open them up to third-party services.
Note
The Lightning Component framework has two programming models, Lightning Web Components and Aura. In this module, we build Rich Publisher Apps using Aura.
So How Does It Work?
The Rich Publisher Apps platform gives you all the necessary tools for creating and integrating interactive apps into your feed’s publisher.
There are three ways to add a Rich Publisher App to your community.
- Get it from AppExchange.
- Build a custom app in your org.
- Port an app through change sets or packages.
From Org to Community
Once you add a Rich Publisher App to an org, it’s available to all communities in that org. Community managers and admins can select and enable available apps in the Administration Workspace in their community.
When you enable a Rich Publisher App in a community, members see the app’s icon in the
publisher, next to 
.
This example shows a Chatter publisher with three custom app integrations. There are icons for attaching a case (1), a GIF (2), and a Trailhead module (3).
From Community to Publisher
Rich Publisher Apps icons appear in the text and question publishers in group, topics, Direct Messages, and user profile feeds. They don’t appear in the poll publisher.
Note
In the question publisher, Rich Publisher App icons appear in the Details section under the rich text editor.
Community members click the icon to open a selection box.
They select something, click Add, then Share or Ask, and Salesforce saves their post content and attachment with the feed item. When a member posts the feed item content, Salesforce includes the selection in their post.
Key Development Concepts
In the next unit, we walk you through creating a dynamic Rich Publisher App. To follow along, it’ll be useful to understand a few concepts.
Payload is a key concept in developing Rich Publisher Apps. A payload is a part of a feed item representation. It’s the thing that’s attached to the feed item—the video, GIF, or widget.
The payload can be a string, a base64 encoded JSON object—whatever you choose. As the developer, you have control over the payload.
When Salesforce fetches a feed item through an API:
- It associates the payload with the feed item.
- It fetches the payload.
- It sends the payload to render in the feed along with the feed item data.
Now let’s look at an overview of the architecture.
The four main components of Rich Publisher Apps
- Composition component (Lightning component)
- Render component (Lightning component)
- Icon (Image file shown in publisher)
- Localizable labels (the header and hover text)
Next, we step through the process of creating these elements and bringing them together into a cohesive and dynamic Rich Publisher App.