It seems likely that few people reading my blog wouldn't already know about Salesforce URLs, but just in case, let's talk fundamentals today.
Whenever you're viewing a page of Salesforce, from the Home page, to a record page, to any part of setup, the URL is a link directly to the thing you're doing. This holds true in all Salesforce environments: production, sandboxes, developer orgs, Trailhead playgrounds, or scratch orgs.
URLs are also pretty important in terms of your location in Setup as well. I try not to assume that things are going to work if I work from a Setup URL in Setup because that just feels dicey. But I often will email the link directly to a field definition or an email template. And note that even this official workaround from Salesforce talks about manipulating the URL to go to a place within Setup.
Now that you know, you can copy that any URL and email it to someone so they can go straight to the page you were just viewing. (Once they've logged in, of course.) Most of the time I recommend using Chatter as a way to direct someone somewhere within Salesforce. But that isn't always convenient. If you're on a Zoom call, for example, and want everyone to take a look at a dashboard, it's way faster to go there, copy the URL, and put that in the Zoom chat than it would be to @mention each of them from a Chatter post on the dashboard. And when writing documentation, it's really convenient to be able to include links to things like particular list views.
The Id's the Thing...
The main reason I wanted to mention URLs, though, was to talk about grabbing record Ids. Because if you ever need to get the Id of a particular record, the URL is often your fastest bestest way to do so. There are other options, from a formula field that puts the Id on the page layout, to including it in a report, or a SOQL query or the like. But if we're talking about grabbing the Ids of just a handful of records, it's hard to beat the simplicity of grabbing them from the URL.
Load this:
https://d4t000000drczua0-dev-ed.lightning.force.com/lightning/r/Contact/0034T0000027laiQAA/viewSelect:
https://d4t000000drczua0-dev-ed.lightning.force.com/lightning/r/Contact/0034T0000027laiQAA/viewCopy.
Reading the Code
While we're at it, Salesforce URLs are a bit more complicated than they used to be, but they're not heard to interpret. In some ways, in Lightning Experience this has gotten both clearer and more obscure. But since we basically all use Lightning now, let's start there. Here is a Lightning URL, for example:
https:// d4t000000drczua0-dev-ed .lightning.force.com /lightning /r /Account /0014T0000027laiQAA /view[Note: I have added spaces for readability where none would normally exist.]
Read in chunks you can actually figure out quite a lot about where you are from this URL.
https:// just indicates to your browser that we are viewing a webpage of a secure connection.
Then comes the name of the actual org I'm logged into. This is a developer edition org. You probably spend most of your time in an org with a custom MyDomain that's similar to the name of your organization.
.lightning.force.com is, of course, the domain for Salesforce itself.
/lightning indicates that you're in Lightning Experience.
/r I'm not really sure what that's for. [Update: A couple people wrote to me indicating that they belive it's for "record."]
/Account indicates—surprise!—that we're viewing an Account record.
/0014T0000027laiQAA is the 18 digit unique record Id of the account we're viewing.
And /view indicates that we're in View mode, not Edit.
Remember how I said this is both clearer and more obscure than in classic. Here's the same record in Classic:
https://d4t000000drczua0-dev-ed.my.salesforce.com/0014T0000027laiOn the on hand, this is much shorter. At a glance you learn a bit less about where you are. On the other hand, I kinda' miss this Classic format because if I needed to grab the Id it was quicker and easier to do so. It's easier to select the tail end of the URL than the part in the middle, as above, particularly since browsers generally truncate the URL. So you aren't even seeing the record Id until you start working within the address bar.
15 or 18?
Did you notice that the Lightning URL shows the 18-digit version of the Id, but Classic URLs show the 15-digit version?
The two versions are completely interchangeable as far as Salesforce is concerned. It's just that the 18-digit version is case insensitive.
When using the 15-digit version case matters. So a program that's not case sensitive could consider two records the same that are not. And you know what's not case sensitive? Microsoft Excel. So when working in Excel to do anything with Salesforce data, you're best off using the 18-digit Id. With a record identifier that's 15 characters long it's not very likely that you'd have two that got confused. But it's not impossible either...
Working with URLs
Interestingly, Salesforce doesn't really care if you keep using the Classic URL format. This is nice because it means you can do less work to go from just having a record Id into getting to the record in question. You can just delete everything after the first slash, paste a record Id after the slash and hit return. Salesforce will load the record, having redirected/translated from your Classic format into the Lightning format. So if you already have
And you paste a report's record id (00O4T000001wNWv) on the end, you'll wind up at
https://d4t000000drczua0-dev-ed.lightning.force.com/lightning/r/Report/00O4T000001wNWvUAM/viewWhich, conveniently, is the report itself!
I've also found that most of the time you can also just paste a different Id in the middle of that Lightning format and Salesforce will figure it out. This is a "your mileage may vary" situation. But if I'm on an account page:
https://d4t000000drczua0-dev-ed.lightning.force.com/lightning/r/Account/0014T0000027laiQAA/viewand I just double-click on the Id:
https://d4t000000drczua0-dev-ed.lightning.force.com/lightning/r/Account/0014T0000027laiQAA/viewand paste the Id of a contact—even just a 15 digit version—and don't edit the "/Account/" portion:
https://d4t000000drczua0-dev-ed.lightning.force.com/lightning/r/Account/0039V00012vl0v/viewWhen I hit Return, Salesforce will happily load the contact page and reconfigure the URL appropriately:
https://d4t000000drczua0-dev-ed.lightning.force.com/lightning/r/Contact/0034T0000027laiQAA/viewSo that's nice.