Email Signature Images as Attachments

I did my best to solve an interesting challenge (solve? nope, probably it is just a workaround 😏). 

Challenge: Why in the Case's Attachment list I cannot select and delete? As you know, there are too many emails, and in each email there is a picture used as the email signature, and that picture is shown as a case's attachment mixep up with the "real" attachments!!!!!!

The installation details are at the end.

For those of you that don't know about this issue, please check these Ideas:

•  Allow Created Date in "Notes & Attachments" related list (8 years ago, and by the time I wrote this, 11 days ago, someone wrote again asking for it). This is more related to the fact that in the ListView we cannot differentiate two files with the same name unless we open them. Hence the Created Date field can help. 
• Email Signature Images as attachments (5 years ago, and by the time I wrote this, 3 days ago, someone wrote again asking for it). If you enabled Email-2-Case, think about how many attachments are just "junk attachments" because they are only signature pictures, the email server assign them some particular names, and attach them to the email.

So, I did some research about the problem and found that:

• It is very common in a Service Cloud instance when Email-2-Case is enabled.
• The solution should start by adding functionality in the Case page to open the new Attachments ListView.
• It will be useful if in the ListView we can preview the document content.

I created a pair of components for a Salesforce Service Console Navigation App, not for the Standard Navigation, please keep this in mind. Did I mentioned Lightning?, well, yes, it is for Lightning 😊.

Everything starts from the Case Page

We need to be able to open the new Attachment ListView from the Case page and instead of creating a button or something of the sort, I made a simple component that will substitute the related list standard component for Attachments. My objective was to avoid a new component only to open the new ListView, and that will clutter the page layout and will face the best practices about the number of components on a page.

The new component OV_CaseAttachments can be added only to the Case page. I believe there is no harm if we substitute the standard component, the only thing we can do with the standard, is to open the file preview or the standard ListView, my component do the last one only.

OK, if you agree, then go and add the component to your Case page! 😉.

But ... wait ... there is something more. When you are in the Edit Page App Builder, check that the component has two parameters:

• Signature Image Prefixes: add here a CSV (no spaces after the comma, please) of what prefixes are more used to name an email signature picture and attach it.
• Attachments List Height: this is the height of the ListView component (the one that "will open"). The objective is that the component fills the available space and I recommend to use a percentage of the screen height (and yes, I was too lazy to find an automatic method to adapt the height and fill the space below the Salesforce headers and tabs, and above the Salesforce footers. Beleive me, it isn't easy 😏).

And enjoy working with the new ListView

You just have to click in View All in the component above, that's it.

I think it is a very user-friendly component, so there is no much to explain. I will simply put here some images with the component in action. The rest, I leave it to you 😀, try it, it's free!!!

Wrap up

It was a try to ease an annoying situation in a very good and huge application as Salesforce. I hope you find it useful.

If you want to install it, it is an unmanaged package in my Developer Org. And ... again, it is free.

Please leave your comments in this blog or contact me in LinkedIn if you have any suggestion that will enhance the functionality, has any problem with it, or just want to do a general comment about it. 

Installation details

• Sandbox: click here

• Production: click here