Salesforce - Lightning Components in Communities

    Recently I built a Lightning component, tested it as in internal user, and it was beautiful. Everything worked as expected. The work was turned over to the project manager to demo to the client. During the demo nothing worked, just errors. After the demo I received the call. “What did you build? Why didn’t it work?”

    I couldn’t understand what had happened. I asked him to show me how he had demonstrated it. He went straight to the community builder, plopped my component on the page, and ERROR! Unbeknownst to me the recordId does not pass to lightning components in the community the way it does as an internal user.

Now you get to learn what I learned.

The problem:

Force:hasRecordId does not work in community builder.

The Record ID is not passed by default in the community builder. However, there is a workaround to use it.

The Solution:

In your component add force:hasRecordId. This is not needed for community builder; however, it ensures it still works in the internal org as a component on the page layout.

<aura:component implements="flexipage:availableForAllPageTypes,forceCommunity:availableForAllPageTypes,force:hasRecordId" >

Add the recordId attribute (if you don’t already have it)

Note: The type should be string, not Id

<aura:attribute name="recordId" type="String"/>

In the Design for your component add

<design:attribute name="recordId" label="Record Id" default="{!recordId}" description="Salesforce Id of the record" />

DONE!

Now you can use v.recordId in your component.

As an example, I have included a piece of JavaScript you can add to your Lightning controller. This simply will output the record ID to the console.

({

    getRecordID : function(component, event, helper) {

        console.log(component.get('v.recordId'));

    }

})