The Top 10 Things You Want to Know About the New Flow Builder

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1. It’s faster and more intuitive

Flow Builder has a brand new user interface that is similar to Lightning App Builder and Process Builder, so if you’re familiar with those tools you’ll feel right at home here. Clean lines and intuitive shapes make it easy to navigate around your flows, and the streamlined toolbox makes it easier to find the element or resource you’re looking for. On top of that, Flow Builder is built with Salesforce’s latest front-end technologies for fast performance – say goodbye to kludgy old Flash!

A complex flow in Flow Builder

2. Some things have been renamed

If you’re an old-school Flownatic, you might have noticed that some things have been renamed or moved around in Flow Builder. For example, the sObject data type is now a Record data type; and static, local and quick actions can all now be found under the Core Action element. As part of the streamlined toolbox, we replaced the Fast Lookup and Record Lookup elements with Get Records, and the other Data elements have received a similar treatment. For a full list of differences, see the Flow Builder vs. Cloud Flow Designer document in Salesforce Help.

3. We couldn’t get to these old Cloud Flow Designer features, but we expect to deliver them in Summer ’19

We know that undo/redo, copy and paste, and the ability to find elements and resources in the canvas are important to you. We’re working hard on these features and expect to release them in Summer ’19. (As always, please make purchasing decisions based on current functionality and not this forward-looking statement!) We just ran out of time to get features into Spring ’19 and decided it was better to release Flow Builder with all the goodness it does have, than to wait another release.

4. You can continue to use Cloud Flow Designer side-by-side with Flow Builder

Starting with Spring ’19, Flow Builder is the default experience when creating new flows and opening existing flows. If you need to use Cloud Flow Designer – perhaps because a feature you need isn’t yet available in Flow Builder – you can re-enable it: in Setup, go to the Process Automation Settings page and deselect the Disable access to Cloud Flow Designer option. With this deselected, flow versions that were saved in Cloud Flow Designer will open in Cloud Flow Designer, and versions that were saved in Flow Builder will open in Flow Builder.

If you have a flow that you saved in Flow Builder and you decide you really need to go back to Cloud Flow Designer, there’s an unofficial solution for that too: see Converting a Flow Builder Flow Version Back to Cloud Flow Designer.

5. Pan the canvas using Space+Click

To pan the canvas, you can press and hold down the Space key, then click anywhere in the canvas and drag.

Animation showing how to toggle pan mode with the space+click combination.

6. Select multiple elements using Shift+Click

We’re working on marquee selection (clicking and dragging to select multiple elements) for a near-term release. Until then, to select multiple elements on the canvas, press and hold down the Shift key, then click on each element you want to add to the selection. Then click on any selected element to move the entire selection.

Animation showing how to select multiple elements to move them.

7. Make a variable a collection variable with a single click

To turn a variable of any data type into a collection variable, select the Allow multiple values (collection) checkbox next to the Data Type field.

The New Resource modal with the Allow multiple values (collection) checkbox selected

8. There are new Lightning Components available out of the box

We added the ability to use Lightning components in flows in Winter ’19, and actually included a number of out-of-the-box components then, like Dependent Picklists, Phone, Email, and Name – but since they were hidden under Extensions in Cloud Flow Designer, you might have missed them. Flow Builder elevates these components to first-class screen components, and with Spring ’19 we have two new components: Address and Display Image.

Remember, when you’re using Lightning components with input fields in them (like Name) you’ll need to specify a variable for the field in the Store Output Values section in the component properties in order to use the field’s value elsewhere in the flow. (This is different from the way screen components like Text work, where the screen component can be used directly as a resource.)

9. New Trailhead content is live!

All of the Trailhead modules and projects that previously referred to Cloud Flow Designer have been rewritten with instructions on how to use Flow Builder. If you’ve previously completed these modules and projects, maybe you’d like a refresher! Otherwise, hold tight until March – brand new flow content will be coming your way soon.

10. There are 2 hours of fresh video tutorials that you can watch

All the Trailhead content related to flows is now up to date with the latest on Flow Builder. In addition, Alex Edelstein ‘s Get Started with the New Flow Builder post on the Salesforce Admins blog has two hours of video tutorial content to help both new and old school flow users get up to speed. From sending an email to building a screen to working with multiple records, these tutorials have you covered!

Winter ’20 Flow Preview!

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I’m pleased to report on the great things the Flow team has built over the Summer. These Flow Previews have become my favorite blogs to write because there are so many goodies to disclose. If you want to try these out immediately, get a free preview org.

Scheduled Flows

It’s now possible to schedule Flows to run on a schedule. This applies to “Autolaunched” flows (i.e. flows without screens). Double-click on the Start element to set the schedule:

Notice that you can also add a record query. At the scheduled time, Flow will run the query and then run the Flow for each returned record, providing a powerful new batch mode capability.

Conditional Field Visibility

Fields can now appear and disappear on the screen as a result of some other field or value.

This is controlled via this new section in the field property editors:

Operator Note: If you’ve just created a field, you have to close the screen and reopen it before that field can be used as a ‘parent’ field. Yes, we think this is annoying too and we’ll fix it next version (this is one of those ‘harder than it looks’ caching yadda state storage yadda yadda problems).

Automatic Output Handling

The Automation group at Salesforce is in the early stages of a multi-release campaign to simplify the process of creating Flows. This will touch nearly every part of the product. One of the first benefits harvested from this can be seen in a change to the Get Records element. As you’ll recall, when you query for a record or a collection of records, Flow requires you to define a variable of the same type to temporarily store the information. That is done here:

You then use the storage variable when you refer to the queried records in a downstream element, like this:

In Winter ’20, you no longer have to do this. The streamlined Get Records looks like this:

Automatically generated references for Get Records queries look like this:

and automatically generated references for Screen Components look like this:

Operator Notes

  • To access the ‘old way’ of doing things, click the new Manually assign variables checkbox at the bottom of the property editor.
  • Existing flows are not converted. For them, the “Manual” checkbox is checked and your existing variables and mappings remain unchanged.
  • You can convert an existing Flow to use automatic output handling by unchecking the “Manual” checkbox, but we’ll put a big warning message up, because you’ll have to fixup any downstream references that use your old variables.
  • In Winter ’20, we implemented support for this in two places: Get Records (as shown above) and Flow Screen Components. We’re working on extending this support to the remaining parts of Flow Builder that currently require manual variables.
  • In a future release, we’re going to continue to improve on this by eliminating the entire “Select Account Fields to Store in Variable” section as well.

Flow Screen Components Built with Lightning Web Components

Lightning Web Components is Salesforce’s new framework for creating fast, reusable components. Flow already has a growing set of custom screen components built using the previous Aura technology, and those will continue to work. We’re advocating that all new development of components be done in the new Lightning Web Component technology, though, and you’re going to start to see new functionality that is only available to Lightning Web Components and not to ones built in Aura.

We’ve published a blog post here that consolidates all of the important information about creating and using LWC-based Flow Screen Components.

Lookup Screen Component

It’s now easy to add a Lookup field to flow screens:

This component includes type-ahead search, and a list of recently chosen records. Here are the input parameters that you can pass in to it:

You configure it by pointing it at an existing Lookup field using the Object API Name and Field API Name fields. If you want to set its initial value, you can pass in a recordId, and you can make the field required.

Canvas Usability Enhancements

Enhancements to the canvas include:

  • Changes to Panning Behavior – Panning is now done by simply clicking and dragging the canvas around. You no longer need to enter a “Panning Mode”.
  • We’ve added the ability to drag-select multiple elements. Toggling the Drag-Select button switches from panning to selection mode. See below for an example:
  • Finally, you’ll notice in the above image, that each element has up to 2 lines of space for its name text.

Per-Profile Flow Permissions

You can optionally secure flow definitions on a per-profile basis.

New Flow List Page

We’ve refreshed the main list view in Setup.

Process Builder Enhancements

We made a couple of enhancements to Process Builder:

  • Process Builder can now trigger on Account Team Member changes. (Account Teams must be enabled in your org)
  • Some Process Builder actions can now use platform event payload data as inputs.
  • Use Process Builder with the new FlowExecutionErrorEvent platform event to generate custom notification schemes when Flow errors occur (see below).

Custom Error Message Notification Schemes

When an error occurs in Flow, a platform event called FlowExecutionErrorEvent is now fired, and you can subscribe to that event with a Process Builder trigger. This lets you use the power of Process Builder and Flow to generate custom error handling. For example, you could set things up so:

  1. If the flow error is coming from one of the Flows that start with “Europe”, send an email to Genevieve and Post to the EuroAdmins chatter group, else
  2. Generate one of those new custom notifications to my desktop, send me an SMS via a Send SMS Flow Action, and create a Case.

There are a few gotchas to keep in mind, and they’re discussed in detail here.

Fiddly Builder Things That Will Make Some People Very Happy

  • You can now activate flows directly from the canvas.
  • When you create a New Resource from a property editor or dialog box, the resulting resource is autopopulated into the text field from where you started.
  • Text Templates now again properly support rich text, although you can now toggle to plain text if you are using the template as an input to something that requires plain text (like the current Send Email action)
  • There’s a new Send Custom Notification action. It’s fun. Try it.

Hope you enjoy! At HQ, we’re now digging into the next wave of enhancements for Spring ’20. See you at Dreamforce!

How To: Use the Map Element in the Strategy Builder

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In the Summer ’19 release, we introduced 3 new elements in the Strategy Builder – Generate, Enhance, and Map. We discussed examples of how to use the Generate and Enhance elements in a previous post. With the Map element, you can modify existing Recommendation fields and create new fields that can be passed to Flow as input variables. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the Map element. Like Generate and Enhance, the output is always a list of recommendations, however, unlike the other two elements, Map doesn’t require you to write any Apex code and relies instead on expressions and formulas.

Use Case 1: Modify Existing Recommendation Fields with Expressions

Suppose you have a Recommendation with the Description, “Thank you for being a loyal customer. We truly appreciate your business!” Now, with the Map element, you can personalize this Description by appending the name of the contact. For example, “Lauren Boyle, Thank you for being a loyal customer. We truly appreciate your business!” You can use this concept to make a variety of easy enhancements using the full power of the Salesforce formula operators and functions.

To do so, first add a Load element to the canvas and load all of the recommendations you want to change (you could also choose to add a Generate element and pass in dynamically generated recommendations). Then, add the Map element to the canvas. In the Map Values to Fields section, set the Description field to be $Record.Contact.Name+ “, ” + Description.

Make sure the Map element (Personalized Thank You) is placed after the Load element. It will transform the Descriptions of all recommendations flowing into it.

When you execute the strategy, your recommendations will look like the image on the right and include the contact name for the current case.

Use Case 2: Create New Fields That Can Be Passed as Inputs to Flow as Input Variables

The Einstein Next Best Action Lightning Component passes two default variables to all Flows – contextRecordId and recommendationId. In the Flow, you can do a Get Records and retrieve the current record on which the strategy is displayed (e.g. Case or Account) or the accepted recommendation. See this post for detailed instructions. With the Map element, you can create new “virtual” fields and pass them to the flow as input variables, in addition to the default ones. This scenario is most useful when you’re working with dynamically created recommendations and want to pass some context to the Flow. Bear in mind that in the case of dynamic recommendations, there is no recommendationId to pass to the Flow.

For example, let’s suppose you create a strategy that generates a set of accounts that you should connect with because the last contact was more than 90 days ago. Check out our Integration Guide for instructions on how to build such a strategy. When the recommendation is accepted, you want to launch a flow that references the selected account. Thus, you want to pass the Account Id to the Flow.

First, make a small tweak to the Recommendation object and add a text field called AccountId__c. Second, in the Apex action responsible for generating recommendations, set the AccountId__c with the ID of the generated account: AccountId__c = account.Id. The modified class would look like the following. 

global class Generate_GetAccountsToFollowUp { 
    @InvocableMethod(label='Accounts to Follow Up Today' 
                     description='Recommend accounts the current user should follow up on today')
    global static List<List<Recommendation>> getAccounts(List<String> inputData){
        List<List<Recommendation>> outputs = new List<List<Recommendation>>();
        Integer daysSinceLastContact;
         Account[] accounts = [SELECT Name, Description, LastContactDate__c, OwnerId FROM Account WHERE OwnerId = :inputData[0]];
      
        List<Recommendation> recs = new List<Recommendation>(); 
        for (Account account:accounts) {
            if (account.LastContactDate__c != null){
                daysSinceLastContact = account.LastContactDate__c.daysBetween(date.today());
                if (daysSinceLastContact > 30){
                    Recommendation rec = new Recommendation(
                        Name = account.Name,
                        Description = 'Connect with the ' + account.Name + ' account, the last interaction was '+ daysSinceLastContact + ' days ago.',
                        ActionReference = 'accountOutreach',
                        AcceptanceLabel = 'View',
                        AccountId__c = account.Id
                    );
                    recs.add(rec);
                }
            }
        }
        outputs.add(recs);
        return outputs; 
    }
}

Third, in the accountOutreach flow, create a text variable, called “accountId,” and mark it as “Available for input.”

Next, add a Map element after the Generate element.

Finally, in the Map element, create a text variable called accountId and set it to be AccountId__c. The variable name MUST match the name of the flow input variable.

The dynamically generated account Id will now be passed as an input variable to the Flow (accountId) and can be referenced to do things like Get Account details.

For example, send an email to each account.

Adding Lightning Web Components to Flow Screens

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Note! This is a preview of Winter ’20 Functionality

For the last two years, Flow creators have been able to add lightning component to Flow Screens. This has powerfully extended the capability of screens. We’ve had a great time creating reusable components as a community, and many of those components are available for use to all comers.

The underlying web technology enabling these components, known as Aura, has served Salesforce well, but it’s more than 5 years old, and that’s a long time when it comes to changes in web technology. Salesforce recently released a major upgrade to its web technology called Lightning Web Components, and the Flow team has been working on making it possible to embed this new generation of components into Flow screens. With the Winter ’20 release, that will be now be possible, so let’s take a look at how it’s done.

In this demonstration, we create an LWC that allows the user to manually add and manage sharing settings on a record. This allows a Sharing button to be placed on Lightning record pages. The guts of this component consist of code written by resident Salesforce evangelist Shane McLaughlin.

To get an LWC to appear in Flow’s Screen Builder, you add a ‘lightning_FlowScreen’ target to the component’s meta file:

To expose attributes from the LWC, you first use @api in the LWC’s javascript, as is standard for any property you want to make accessible outside of the component:

Then you additionally specify which of these public properties should be additionally made visible in Flow by adding a targetConfig section:

The type field supports the same types that Flow supports with aura components. That includes specific Sobjects like “Contact” and specific SObject collections like “Account[]”.

Note the following syntax for specifying SObjects and Apex Classes:

  • @salesforce/schema/<name of sObject>
  • apex://<name of Apex class>
  • add array notation if it is a collection []

with a namespaced org you have to include the namespace in the type string using the namespace prefix. So, for SObjects it would look like type=”@salesforce/schema/myNs__CoolCustomObject__c” and similarly for apex type=”apex://myNs__MyApexClass”

The ‘role’ parameter can be added to property elements inside of targetConfigs. It has been created specifically to provide support for Flow’s ability to limit access to inputOnly or outputOnly. If no role is specified, the property is available in both directions.

Validation

To tie an LWC into Flow’s validation capabilities, create a function called “validate” in your js file like this:

validate() {
    if(/* true conditions */) { 
         return { isValid: true }; 
        } 
    else { 
    //If the component is invalid, return the isValid parameter as false and return an error message. 
         return { 
               isValid: false, 
               errorMessage: '/*A message that helps your user enter a valid value or explains what went wrong.*/' 
                }; 
     }}) 
}

Navigation

To programmatically transition a Flow with an LWC component, you dispatch an event using this syntax:

import { LightningElement, api } from 'lwc';
import { FlowNavigationNextEvent } from 'lightning/flowSupport';

export default class NameOfYourComponent extends LightningElement {

   @api
   handleGoNext() {
       const nextNavigationEvent = new FlowNavigationNextEvent("dummy");
       this.dispatchEvent(nextNavigationEvent);
   }
}

The supported events are:

  • FlowNavigationNextEvent
  • FlowNavigationBackEvent
  • FlowNavigationFinishEvent
  • FlowNavigationPauseEvent

These events currently require a string to be passed into them, but the actual value of the string is irrelevant, so the example above just uses “dummy”.

Sample Gists

https://gist.github.com/alexed1/e3e580103375120ca2dc1374bb4f73ff

Flow Actions for Strings: URL Encoding and Number Formatting

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Arnab Bose contacted me this morning and wanted a couple of Flow Actions for transforming strings. He’s building some cool Flow and Quip integrations and needed a way to easily take a string with spaces and URL Encode it so he could put it in a URL (for example: ‘my cat’ becomes ‘my+cat’). He also had some numbers in string form that he wanted to add commas to (i.e convert 2348934 to 2,348,934).

In Apex, these are super simple because of the large library of available functions. To URL encode a string, you just write:

String encoded = EncodingUtil.urlEncode(myString, 'UTF-8');

and to format a string, you can just write:

response.outputStr = Integer.valueOf(inputStr).format()

But the fun part of Flow is not having to write code. So I created a couple of Apex Actions that carry these out:

You can install these from here.

The source code is available here and is a great template to convert other Apex string functions.

Easy “IN” Filters in Flow with the FilterCollection Flow Action

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Intro Video

SOQL provides a useful IN operator that filters the query on a specific set of values:

credit: https://www.salesforcetutorial.com/soql-in-operator/

You currently can’t do this directly in the Flow Builder Get Records element, but you can install this FilterCollection Flow Action to provide the capability.

Out of the box, this action is set up to support standard objects: Contact, Account, Opportunity, Lead, Product, Case. You can easily modify it in Apex to support additional objects of your choice (see customization, below).

Installation

Instructions

For our example, we want to query for all accounts that have an Industry that’s IN Banking or Chemicals. We expect to get back three of these four accounts:

Configure this Action by passing three pieces of information:

  1. A collection of SObjects. You can pick from the supported list. At this moment, 5 standard objects are supported. You can only pass in a single collection of SObjects. Leave the other inputs blank.
  2. ‘filterField’: The name of the field on your SObject that you want to filter on. In our example we’ll set this to Industry.
  3. The target values. These are equivalent to ‘Rose’ and ‘Sean’ in the above example image. In our example, we’ll pass in Banking and Chemicals. You can pass the values in either as a single comma-separated list in the targetValuesCSVString input, or as a collection of strings in the targetValuesStringCollection (don’t use both at the same time).

Here’s an example of a properly configured set of inputs:

This action will return a corresponding collection of filtered objects. Make sure you create a collection variable of the appropriate Record type and map it in the Store Output Values tab.

Optional: Customization

The following information is for advanced Flow users and discusses how this action can be modified to support additional types of objects. A current limitation in Flow makes it so that Apex Actions have to add specific code for each specific sObject they want to support (it’s on the roadmap to eliminate this limitation). So the bad news is that only 5 common standard objects are currently supported in FilterCollection.

The good news, though, is that it’s easy to add support for additional standard objects and custom objects.

To add support for an additional object, you have to add code in four places. First, add an input variable to the Requests inner class and an output variable to the Results inner class:

To process the input collection, add a code block based on the five lines immediately below. This has the effect of casting (transforming) your specific SObject collection to a general SObject collection. Then at the end, add a when clause to the switch statement to cast the general filtered-down collection back to the specific SObject type that Flow needs:


If you do add more standard objects, please consider making a pull request to the source code so everyone can benefit from your work!

Source Code

TDX Session Video:Building Advanced Flows with Choices, Loops, and New Apex-defined Types

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Here’s a broadcast of one of the two Advanced Flow sessions from TDX.

Flow Action: Get Picklist Values

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In my spare time I’m experimentally rebuilding Approval Processes on top of Flow and I recently had a need for a way in Flow to retrieve a set of picklist values that I could then work with. So I built a simple Flow Action to enable all flow designers to do this without code.

It’s a little like the Picklist Choice Set resource in that you hand it the name of an Object and a Field, but it returns a collection of strings that you can then work with directly.

You can iterate through the values but one of the most useful things to do with this is to pass them into the new multiselect dual listbox screen component to let the user pick from among them.

Documentation

Provide this action with the api names of your target Object and Field. Field must be a picklist.

Install (Unmanaged Package)

Source Code

Scaling to Thousands of Screens with Lightning Flow

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In the common diagnostic use case, you have a tree structure of information and you work your way through the tree, gathering information and using it to determine the next diagnostic question. This is useful for important and distinctive use cases like troubleshooting and coming up with a good offer. Here’s an example:

Now, you can see four screens in this flow, and creating four screens isn’t too hard, especially with Flow Builder’s Duplicate tool. However, what if you have 500 of these screens? And what if this content is constantly changing and you want to make it possible for non-Admins to maintain it?

There’s a great way to address this use case, and I call it the Troubleshooter pattern. In this pattern, you don’t insert the content into screen elements. Instead you insert it into records of a custom object. Then you use a single Screen to load the appropriate custom object’s content for display. Part of the content includes a set of choices that the user can use to signal where they want to go next. Each choice points to a target set of content.

Here’s the entire flow used to show the above content:

Two custom objects have been created here:

DiagnosticNode represent a screenful of information. It includes a rich text content field to display to the agent or user or technician. It also contains a radio button group that gets loaded with all of the node’s child DiagnosticOutcomes.

DiagnosticOutcome represents a single choice/answer that might come out of a particular DiagnosticNode. It will render as a radio button choice and has two important properties: the Label and a lookup to a different “Target” DiagnosticNode.

The beautiful thing about this approach is that the creation, editing, reporting, analytics of the content nodes themselves is all done with regular Salesforce records. For example, if I want to build out my tree of decisions, I first create a new target DiagnosticNode:

And then add as many different destination outcomes as I want:

Sources of Content

The flow can display content either from the rich text “Node Content” field on the DiagnosticNode custom object or from a Knowledge article. To use Knowledge, check the box on a DiagnosticNode and select the desired article.

Editing Content

A button at the bottom of the page provides easy access to the record containing the content being looked at. This makes use of a custom Flow Screen Component called Navigation Button.

git source for the full project (including Knowledge support)

Install the Sample Flow Shown Above. (NOTE: The sample does not have the Knowledge support because of a packaging problem, but it’s easy to add).

  1. To install, you may need to:Create Custom Tabs for Diagnostic Node and Diagnostic Outcome in Setup –> Tabs
  2. Turn on visibility for each of the fields in Diagnostic Node and Diagnostic Outcome (to do this, use Object Manager, select each field, and then click on Set Field-Level Security
  3. Manually create at least one Diagnostic Node to serve as your initial node. The sample flow currently asks for the ID of that initial node. Get it from the URL.