* Salesforce Field Service *

Hi everyone,

we are currently using Salesforce Field Service to manage preventive and corrective maintenance for a large number of photovoltaic plants across multiple regions.  After several months of adoption, we have realized that our current configuration — with very granular Contract Line Items (one for each maintenance activity) — does not fit well with our operational model.

We are now trying to redesign the process for ordinary (preventive) maintenance, with the following business goals:

• Each plant should have two main maintenance appointments per year, where the majority of service contract items (including semi-annual ones) are grouped together.
• During these aggregated interventions, the technician on the FSL Mobile App should:
  • see a checklist containing all the contract line items to be worked on;
  • easily check off completed items, add notes, and attach photos, while keeping full traceability for each activity.
• The contract line items excluded from these aggregated visits — as well as any not completed during the intervention — should be automatically rescheduled or combined with:
  • other service appointments created from incidents or corrective tickets, or
  • planned extraordinary maintenance appointments when compatible.
• The Dispatcher, when creating a new Work Order, should be able to:
  • instantly see all unscheduled or pending contract line items, and
  • receive automatic suggestions of items that can be scheduled together with new service appointments for the same site/asset.

Our current setup generates one work order per contract line item, which results in excessive volume and poor visibility for dispatchers.

👉 Question:  What would be the most effective way — using Salesforce Field Service best practices — to achieve this aggregated scheduling model?  Is it feasible to handle this through standard objects and Flows (e.g., using flags, maintenance plans, or grouped service appointments), or would this scenario require a more advanced custom implementation?

Any advice, examples, or Trailhead resources related to similar use cases (preventive maintenance aggregation or smart rescheduling) would be highly appreciated.

Thank you!

@* Salesforce Field Service * 

Hello team,  I keep getting a toast message saying 'Manifest was malformed' when I try to login to the Field Service Mobile app for a user on our Dev Sandbox environments. I don't get the same error when using another QA Sandbox environment. I have attached a snippet of the error log (Copilot says the server is getting HTML response instead of javascript) but it doesn't give a stack trace from which I could figure out where exactly the failure lies.   Following are my troubleshooting steps so far:

• Uninstall and re-install the app from Playstore for my Android device
• Clear Cache and cookies, hard close, and re-open app and re-login
• Deactivate and Re-activate the Service Resource, ensure it is linked to the correct User
• Create a new Service Resource linked to a new user
• Check the Field Service Mobile app builder config and compare it with the config on the QA Sandbox
• Check the Field Service Mobile settings and compared it to the settings on QA Sandbox

Error log snippet:  2026-07-27T01:55:51.708Z W/BootstrapHostApp: Failed to downloadApp  com.salesforce.lightning.mobileruntime.download.DownloaderException$InvalidData: Manifest was malformed  at com.salesforce.lightning.mobileruntime.download.ManifestDownloader.fetchManifest(Unknown Source:128)  at com.salesforce.lightning.mobileruntime.download.ManifestDownloader$fetchManifest$1.invokeSuspend(Unknown Source:12)  at kotlin.coroutines.jvm.internal.BaseContinuationImpl.resumeWith(Unknown Source:10)  at kotlinx.coroutines.UndispatchedCoroutine.afterResume(Unknown Source:30)  at kotlinx.coroutines.AbstractCoroutine.resumeWith(Unknown Source:13)  at kotlin.coroutines.jvm.internal.BaseContinuationImpl.resumeWith(Unknown Source:46)  at kotlinx.coroutines.UndispatchedCoroutine.afterResume(Unknown Source:30)  at kotlinx.coroutines.AbstractCoroutine.resumeWith(Unknown Source:13)  at kotlin.coroutines.jvm.internal.BaseContinuationImpl.resumeWith(Unknown Source:46)  at kotlinx.coroutines.DispatchedTask.run(Unknown Source:128)  at kotlinx.coroutines.internal.LimitedDispatcher$Worker.run(Unknown Source:3)  at kotlinx.coroutines.scheduling.TaskImpl.run(Unknown Source:2)  at kotlinx.coroutines.scheduling.CoroutineScheduler.runSafely(Unknown Source:0)  at kotlinx.coroutines.scheduling.CoroutineScheduler$Worker.executeTask(Unknown Source:33)  at kotlinx.coroutines.scheduling.CoroutineScheduler$Worker.runWorker(Unknown Source:28)  at kotlinx.coroutines.scheduling.CoroutineScheduler$Worker.run(Unknown Source:0)  Caused by: kotlinx.serialization.json.internal.JsonDecodingException: Unexpected JSON token at offset 2: Expected start of the object '{', but had '<' instead at path: $  JSON input:   <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C/.....  at kotlinx.serialization.json.internal.JsonExceptionsKt.JsonDecodingException(SourceFile:3)  at kotlinx.serialization.json.internal.JsonExceptionsKt.JsonDecodingException(SourceFile:10)  at kotlinx.serialization.json.internal.AbstractJsonLexer.fail(Unknown Source:51)  at kotlinx.serialization.json.internal.AbstractJsonLexer.fail$default(Unknown Source:14)  at kotlinx.serialization.json.internal.AbstractJsonLexer.unexpectedToken(Unknown Source:103)  at kotlinx.serialization.json.internal.StringJsonLexer.consumeNextToken(SourceFile:14)  at kotlinx.serialization.json.internal.StreamingJsonDecoder.beginStructure(Unknown Source:22)  at com.salesforce.lightning.mobileruntime.bootstrap.json.BootstrapManifest$$serializer.deserialize(SourceFile:1)  at com.salesforce.lightning.mobileruntime.bootstrap.json.BootstrapManifest$$serializer.deserialize(SourceFile:2)  at kotlinx.serialization.json.internal.StreamingJsonDecoder.decodeSerializableValue(Unknown Source:314)  at kotlinx.serialization.json.Json.decodeFromString(SourceFile:3)  at com.salesforce.lightning.mobileruntime.bootstrap.json.BootstrapManifest$Companion.fromJson(Unknown Source:20)  at com.salesforce.lightning.mobileruntime.download.ManifestDownloader.fetchManifest(Unknown Source:104)  ... 15 more    2026-07-27T01:55:51.713Z E/LdsEnvironmentManagerImpl: LDS bootstrap failed  com.salesforce.lightning.mobileruntime.download.DownloaderException$InvalidData: Manifest was malformed  at com.salesforce.lightning.mobileruntime.download.ManifestDownloader.fetchManifest(Unknown Source:128)  at com.salesforce.lightning.mobileruntime.download.ManifestDownloader$fetchManifest$1.invokeSuspend(Unknown Source:12)  at kotlin.coroutines.jvm.internal.BaseContinuationImpl.resumeWith(Unknown Source:10)  at kotlinx.coroutines.UndispatchedCoroutine.afterResume(Unknown Source:30)  at kotlinx.coroutines.AbstractCoroutine.resumeWith(Unknown Source:13)  at kotlin.coroutines.jvm.internal.BaseContinuationImpl.resumeWith(Unknown Source:46)    Thanks in advance team, any help is greatly appreciated.    - Swapnil    @* Salesforce Field Service * 

Heads up: Upcoming Update to Appointment Assistant – Self-Service Scheduling

We're rolling out an important update to the 

Book New Appointment

 flow in Appointment Assistant's self-service scheduling. We want to give you a heads-up ahead of time so you can prepare. 

What's changing?

This update includes a security improvement to the flow. If your org has customized the 

Book New Appointment

 flow — particularly around the authentication step — you may want to review your configuration before the update reaches your environment to ensure everything continues to work as expected. 

What you should do:

If you're using self-service scheduling and would like to be included in coordinated testing:

• Send me your sandbox org ID via DM
• Drop a comment in this thread letting me know you've sent it so I don't miss it!

What coordinated testing looks like:

• We deploy the update to your sandbox first, so you can validate the flow end-to-end
• If everything runs smoothly, we move forward with production deployment
• If you encounter any issues, our team will work closely with you to resolve them

We're committed to making this transition as smooth as possible, and your feedback is genuinely valuable to us. 

For more details, refer to the 

https://help.salesforce.com/s/issue?id=a02g70000063NkbAAE

. 

Questions or want to be included in coordinated testing?

 DM me your sandbox org ID and comment here so I know to look out for it! 

Hi everyone, 

I'm trying to implement a custom emergency dispatch process in Salesforce Field Service using Apex, and I'm looking for guidance on whether it's possible to replicate the behaviour of the Emergency Scheduling Wizard. 

For an emergency Service Appointment, I need to:

• Find the nearest Field Service Technician (Service Resource).
• Assign the Service Appointment to that technician even if they already have an existing appointment (allow overlapping appointments).
• Pin the Service Appointment.
• Automatically dispatch the appointment.

Current Behaviour: 

I'm currently using an Emergency Scheduling Policy to retrieve available slots. However, it only returns technicians who have available capacity or free time slots. 

If the nearest technician already has an appointment, they isn't returned by the scheduling APIs, even though our business requirement is to assign the emergency appointment to that technician by allowing an overlap. 

I'm referring to the Salesforce documentation for Emergency Scheduling: 

1. How does the Emergency Scheduling Wizard determine the nearest technician?
2. Does it use internal logic that isn't exposed through the standard Field Service scheduling APIs?
3. Is there a supported Apex or Field Service API that can return the nearest Service Resource regardless of existing appointments?
4. Has anyone successfully implemented this scenario in Apex?
5. What is the Salesforce-recommended approach for reproducing the Emergency Scheduling Wizard behaviour programmatically?

Ultimately, we're trying to build a custom Apex solution that behaves the same as the Emergency Scheduling Wizard, but we're unable to retrieve the nearest technician when they already have scheduled work. 

Any guidance, recommended approach, or experience with this scenario would be greatly appreciated. 

Thanks in advance!