From Shantinath Patil: Appointments with Dynamic Duration
In Salesforce Scheduler, Work Type is an entity where we store information about the skeleton of an invite. It’s just a template we can use to define meeting duration, block time before/after, timeframe start/end.
In the provided flow templates, work type selection happens with the help of a work type group. You first select a work type group, then a territory, and based on these two combinations; a work type is chosen automatically. Well, not automatically! The internal logic determines work type based on linking these three objects, as shown below ERD diagram.
Since the Scheduler data model only allows to map one work type to one work type group, there can always be only one work type for the selection of work type group and service territory.
This one-to-one mapping poses a limitation for a requirement where we want to define different duration based on customers needs. The good news is, there is a way to overcome this. This blog will discuss one of the approaches to set up Scheduler data to achieve dynamic duration. The basic premise is to duplicate the work type group and work type records based on durations.
Consider a scenario where you have a premier customer and a regular customer with whom you want to set up a meeting about ‘Wealth Management’. In this scenario, let’s consider that an exclusive customer always needs an appointment with a longer duration, say 90 minutes. Other customers may need a meeting with the same topic for 30/60 minutes. We can store this information on the work type group record for now. The data setup may look something like this:
Once the data is mapped correctly via junction objects in the above format, we can then carve out the following logic:
Following is the working flow with different duration:
VIDEO LINK: https://youtu.be/fwdVoxrrpgY
As you can see based on work type group selection, the flow selects the corresponding work type and duration gets adjusted accordingly.
You may ask this may confuse the end-user! Yes, looking at the same topic titles 3 times may confuse some end users! For this, you can either build your own component to display only the appointment topic and duration to choose. This approach may sound cleaner, but there is one more solution coming up in Spring 22 release. That feature allows you to filter work type groups shown on the screen by passing record ids to the component. We will cover more on that in another blog!
