With every Salesforce release, the ecosystem becomes smarter, faster, and more user friendly. However, as the platform evolves, so do the complexities of maintaining test automation scripts.
The Spring ’25 release is no exception, with exciting new UI changes and enhanced components designed to improve productivity for users. This blog post explores the key Spring ’25 changes that significantly impact testing, and how Provar’s intelligent automation platform helps you navigate these complexities seamlessly.
Here’s the good news: With Provar’s advanced automation capabilities, you can stop worrying about broken scripts and start focusing on the future. Let’s break down the Spring ’25 changes, their real world impact, and how Provar ensures your testing scripts remain bulletproof and provides you the real impact of the Salesforce Release on your org.
Advanced Search Changes: A Replacement for Lookups
What’s Changing:
The traditional Lookup screen has undergone a major transformation in Spring ’25, evolving into a brand new Advanced Search screen built on lwc with new elements such as radio buttons and search and select options. From a test automation perspective, this is a significant change that impacts all objects and nearly every test case. These updates necessitate creating new automation scripts for tools.
Usage and Impact:
Lookups are integral to Salesforce workflows and are widely used in end to end flows for both Standard and Custom objects. Rewriting scripts for every object with conventional tools could result in considerable effort, frustration, and a loss of critical time during the Salesforce release cycle.
How Provar Helps:
Provar ensures that your existing Lookup scripts remain fully functional even with this new Advanced Search screen.This saves substantial time and effort, allowing testers to focus on creating new test cases instead of revisiting and maintaining the old ones.
Path Assistant’s LWC Transition
What’s Changing:
In an interesting update not explicitly mentioned in the release notes, the Path Assistant has been moved to the LWC framework, aligning with Salesforce’s long term vision of migrating to LWC. This change alters the DOM structure for all Path components, introducing challenges for automation scripts built on the previous framework.
Usage and Impact:
The Path Assistant plays a critical role in guiding users through key workflows, such as sales stages and case resolutions. While the transition to LWC enhances performance and responsiveness, it can disrupt automation scripts that rely on older DOM structures, leading to potential rework and delays.
How Provar Helps:
Provar handles the transition effortlessly, ensuring that existing and new path scripts work flawlessly. This means your automation is ready to embrace Salesforce’s Lightning future without missing a beat and also saves significant time and effort by eliminating the need for script rework.
ICU Locale Format Change
What’s Changing:
As previously highlighted, the ICU locale format changes, first notified in Winter ’20, will now be enforced in Spring ’25. This change marks Salesforce’s transition from Oracle’s JDK to International Components for Unicode (ICU) locale formats. It impacts the formatting of dates, times, currencies, addresses, names, and numeric values. Consequently, test automation scripts relying on the older JDK locale formats may require updates to align with the ICU formats.
Usage and Impact:
ICU enablement is a significant step forward, but it brings challenges for automation scripts that include date or numeric validations. This change affects date formatting and other locale sensitive data across all objects and workflows, potentially causing script failures if not addressed in time.
How Provar Helps:
Provar has proactively supported the ICU locale format for several releases. With Provar’s compatibility for both JDK and ICU formats, users are saved from disruptions. This ensures your existing scripts work seamlessly, saving time and effort while maintaining focus on core business functions rather than reworking test scripts.
Stacked Modals & List View renders in LWC
What’s Changing:
Salesforce’s ongoing transition from Aura to LWC brings significant updates. Modal windows in Lightning Experience now render using LWC, with added support for Dynamic Forms in modals launched from a Create from Lookup field on LWC-enabled record pages. Similarly, List Views for standard and custom objects now render using LWC, replacing the previous Aura-based implementation. Enabling these updates introduces minor changes to DOM structure and modal behavior.
Usage and Impact:
Modal pop-ups are widely used across Salesforce objects such as New, Edit, Clone, and similar screens. Likewise, List Views are critical for navigating and managing data across standard and custom objects. The transition to LWC impacts the DOM structure and behavior, potentially causing failures in test automation scripts reliant on older Aura patterns.
How Provar Helps:
Provar is fully aligned with Salesforce’s LWC migration strategy, ensuring a seamless transition for automation scripts. Provar handles these updates without requiring any modifications to existing scripts, saving users significant time and effort. This allows testers to continue working without interruptions, even as Salesforce evolves its platform.
Section Metadata Sync for Standard/Flexi Pages
What’s Changing:
Hidden sections in page layouts are now treated as independent layouts, rather than being grouped under the previous section. This change alters the DOM indexing for subsequent sections and brings it in sync with layout information on Record Layout and metadata. As a result, key screens like New, View, and Edit are impacted across Salesforce objects.
Usage and Impact:
The Path component change affects opportunities, leads, campaigns, contracts, contacts, orders, and custom objects etc record detail pages in Lightning Experience (with the exception of Campaigns and Tasks). This change also impacts non-English languages as well. For testers and admins, metadata shifts often lead to cascading script failures, requiring substantial updates and effort to fix issues tied to fixed DOM indexing.
How Provar Helps:
Provar guarantees seamless compatibility with these updates, ensuring that existing test cases, including those for Path components, remain fully functional. This eliminates disruptions and allows testers to focus on Spring ’25 functionalities instead of time consuming script fixes. Provar saves you effort, reduces complexity, and ensures a hassle free transition.
Card View of Related List and Recent Items
What’s Changing:
Updates to the DOM attributes for Related List, Related List Single, and Recent Items have been introduced. However, these changes are limited to the Card View layout for Related List Single and Recent Items, while the Table View remains unaffected.
Usage and Impact:
Card Views are widely preferred for their visual clarity and ease of navigation, especially in compact or flexi page layouts. These updates impact all fields under Recent Items and Related Lists, RL Singles in the Card View, potentially causing automation scripts that rely on the updated class attributes to encounter errors.
How Provar Helps:
Provar ensures complete compatibility with these changes, allowing seamless automation for Card Views of Related List, Related List Single, and Recent Items. Provar’s capabilities eliminate script failures and the need for tedious updates, saving valuable time and effort for your team while maintaining the integrity of your testing flow.
Date Time Calendar on Classic Screens
What’s Changing:
For the first time in a while, an interesting change has been observed in Classic screens. While there are no functional or DOM changes, the Date Time calendar now lingers even after tabbing off during inline edits in Spring ’25. This disrupts the end to end automation flow, causing issues when setting values in other fields via automation.
Usage and Impact:
Date Time fields are widely used across multiple Standard and Custom Objects. This lingering behavior has a broad impact, as it interferes with setting other fields and disrupts the automated test flow. This can result in failed executions and inefficiencies.
How Provar Helps:
Provar handles this behavior seamlessly, ensuring that your scripts remain unaffected by the lingering Date Time calendar. Provar employs alternate mechanisms to close the floating calendar window, allowing smooth execution of scripts without interruptions.
Refreshed Visual Style with Themes for SLDS 2 (Beta)
What’s Changing:
Salesforce has introduced SLDS 2 (beta), which is now enabled by default in new and existing Starter and Pro Suite orgs, as well as in new Sales orgs across all editions and select new Service orgs. SLDS 2 brings an enhanced design system with flexible styling frameworks and advanced theming options. For more details about availability, refer to Enhanced Lightning User Interface in Salesforce Help.
Usage and Impact:
SLDS 2 (beta) is the next-generation design system for Salesforce products built on the Lightning Platform. With its pro code customization capabilities, this update offers more styling options. However, changes to UI properties and styling frameworks may disrupt UI test automation scripts, as modifications to DOM attributes or styles could lead to script failures.
How Provar Helps:
In the initial assessment on Pro Suite orgs, Provar delivered positive results, successfully recognizing all elements without requiring any script updates. While SLDS 2 is still in beta, Provar’s compatibility ensures that existing scripts remain functional. Further assessments will be conducted when the feature becomes generally available across all editions, minimizing potential disruptions for users.
Internal DOM Structure change for Base Lightning Components
What’s Changing:
In Spring ’25, the internal DOM structure of base Lightning components is undergoing significant changes to align with native Shadow DOM adoption in Lightning Components. This shift ensures better alignment with web standards. Test automation scripts relying on the previous internal structure of these components may encounter disruptions.
List
The impacted components include:
- lightning-carousel
- lightning-carousel-image
- lightning-click-to-dial
- lightning-datatable
- lightning-file-upload
- lightning-input-field
- lightning-output-field
- lightning-record-form
- lightning-record-edit-form
- lightning-record-view-form
- lightning-tree
For a complete reference, see the official documentation.
How Provar Helps:
Provar ensures seamless compatibility with these updates by handling the changes to the shadow dom and internal DOM structure automatically. Provar scripts for both existing executions and new mappings remain fully functional, requiring no additional effort from users. This enables testers to confidently rely on their scripts and focus on analyzing the Salesforce release’s impact on their org, rather than fixing test automation scripts.
Additional Noteworthy Updates from the Release Notes:
- Agentforce for Sales & Console Cloud
- Book Sandbox Slots for Peak Load Testing with Scale Test
- Sort List Views & Related Lists by Multiple Columns
- Object-Level View All Fields Permission
- Redirect to a Newly Created Record
Why This Matters to You
Every Salesforce release is a double-edged sword. While it brings new features, it also introduces challenges for testers and admins managing automation. Without the right tools, you could be spending hours fixing broken scripts, updating page objects, and troubleshooting errors.
Provar is designed with Salesforce’s rapid evolution in mind, ensuring that your automation remains future proof, seamless, and efficient.
Want to learn more about how Provar can help you keep pace with every Salesforce release and product update? Contact our team today!
View the full list of changes here: https://documentation.provar.com/documentation/support/spring 25 release 1/
Review Salesforce Release Notes: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=release-notes.salesforce_release_notes.htm&release=254&type=5
