The Lightning Data Service component force:recordData provides utility functions to create a new record, save an existing record, delete a record, and detect changes on a Salesforce object. This makes it very easy to build the components used on Salesforce record pages.

Let's suppose that we have a Lightning component with an aura:id attribute, illustrated as recordComponent in the following code:

<force:recordData aura:id="recordComponent"
      recordId="{!v.recordId}"
      layoutType="FULL"
      targetRecord="{!v.record}"
      targetFields="{!v.simpleRecord}"
      targetError="{!v.recordError}"
      recordUpdated="{!c.handleRecordUpdated}"
      mode = "VIEW"
      />

The following section will describe code snippets for various operations that perform data manipulation.