Go With The (Salesforce) Flow
The Salesforce Cloud Flow Designer AKA Salesforce Flow is a powerful tool that allows you to build complex logic without writing any code. It is the premier declarative development tool within the Force.com Platform. It enables you to leverage Variables, Constants, Formulas and logical processes like Decisions, Lookups, and more to interact and update the data within your Salesforce Org.
Two Primary Types of Flows
Autolaunched Flow: This flow does not require any user interaction and can be launched automatically such as from a process or Apex.
Interview: This flow requires user interaction. The flow can take different paths depending on the information the user inputs as they navigate through a series of screens. This flow can run from a URL directly, be added as a button to any record page (run as a pop-up), or embedded within a Visualforce page.
What Can You Do With A Salesforce Flow?
A Salesforce Flow can accomplish a combination of anything a user could do manually with anything a workflow rule could do, and more! Need to clone an account and duplicate all of its associated contacts, opportunities & contracts and automatically associate them with the new account? You can do that! Want to guide a user through a series of screens in order to gather all the necessary information for a contract AND based on this info and data contained within the Account, Opportunity, and existing Contracts decide whether the new request can fall under an existing contract or a new contract is needed? Once that decision has been made, it can automatically create the new records! What if you need to manually share an Account & Opportunity (Read/Write) within a private sharing model, specifically to whichever user is input into a custom lookup field (Opp –> User)? You can do this with an autolaunched flow!
Need to create a button on an Opportunity that will automatically close the Opp as Won, create a new Contract record with information from the Account & Opportunity, AND create a Case assigned to a specific service queue that will fulfill the sale? An Interview Flow allows this!
Get Ready!
As you can probably already tell, Flows are a powerful thing. We’ll spend some time getting you up and running if you’ve never worked with Salesforce Flow before. Then we’ll really focus on some less covered topics such as:
- How to default an existing picklist value within a flow (to its current value).
- Set the finish location of a flow embedded within a visualforce page.
- How to work with multi-select picklists within a flow, retain current values and append or add new ones.
- Workaround for a flow interview that creates a new record that the running user only has access to based on sharing rules and the sharing rules haven’t taken affect yet!
- How to share specific records automatically using an autolaunched flow without sharing rules!
We’re going to have lots of fun. If there is anything in particular that you would like to cover, I would love to hear about it in the comments!
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