Field-level security

Until now, we have talked about record-level access; it refers to governing which records are accessible by users, including the OWD and sharing rule. Now we will go a step further and discuss how we can hide key fields from a group of users. Data is very important for any organization; it may contain highly sensitive information, such as bank account details. Salesforce allows you to use field-level security to make fields hidden or read only for a specific profile. There are three ways to set field-level security in Salesforce:

• From an object field
• From a profile
• Field accessibility

From an object field

A business scenario: Alok Sinfal is working as system administrator at Universal Containers. His manager Brigette Hyacinth wants to set the Rating field on the Lead object to be read-only for all users because they have a process created to auto-set the rating for lead objects based on a few fields.

Perform the following steps to solve the preceding business requirement:

1. Click on Setup (gear icon) | Setup | PLATFORM TOOLS | Objects and Fields | Object Manager and then click on the Lead object.
2. Now navigate to the Fields & Relationships section, and click on the Rating field.
3. The next step is to click on the Set Field-Level Security button, as shown in the following screenshot. It will redirect you to a new page where you can set the field-level security:
   
4. Select Visible and Read-Only for all profiles other than that of the System Administrator. For System Administrator, select only Visible, as shown in the following screenshot:
   
5. Once you are done, click on Save.

Through profile

The field-level setting is also available on the profile. Perform the following steps to solve the preceding business requirement using profile settings:

1. Click on Setup (gear icon) | Setup | ADMINISTRATION | Users | Profiles, then click on the System Administrator profile.
2. Under the Apps section, click on Object Settings, and then select the Lead object.
3. The next step is to click on Edit and navigate to the Field Permission section, as shown in the following screenshot:
   

   From here you can set the Field-Level Security for Lead object fields.

Field accessibility

We can achieve a similar outcome by using Field Accessibility option. Perform the following steps to solve the preceding business requirement using Field Accessibility:

1. Click on Setup (gear icon) | Setup | SETTINGS | Security | Field Accessibility.
2. Click on the Lead object. It will redirect you to a new page where you can select View by Fields or View by Profiles.
3. For the preceding business requirement, select View by Fields and then select the field Rating.
4. Click on the Editable link as shown in the following screenshot:
   
5. It will open the Lead Settings for Lead Field page, where you can edit the field-level security. Once done, click Save.