Record Criteria on Lookup Fields

When putting a lookup field on a page, you will most often want to filter which records are available for selection. This is done by configuring “Record Criteria”, found at the bottom of the field configuration dialog, as shown here:

Search reference fields in lookup criteria

If your lookup field refers to an object, like the Account object, as in the screenshot above, that has other lookup fields on it, you can search the name field of the records in that nested lookup, as shown above.

Some search syntax that may be useful in these searches are:

1. The caret (^) character indicates the beginning of the record name, so that searching for the string “^Academic” will return all and only those records whose name begins with the string “Academic”
2. The dollar ($) character indicates the end of the record name, so that searching for the string “Program$” will return all and only those records whose name ends with the string “Program”

Record Expression

Note that you can combine your Record Criteria filters into a logical expression to fine-tune which records are available for selection from the lookup field by the end user.