Ryan Mercer has contributed some fantastic extensions. When he took his modest new role as the Director of Salesforce Development at the Executive Office of the President over in the White House, most of us assumed he wouldn’t have time to publish any new extensions for a while. But I’m pleased to report that the has created a flow action that taps the main USPS Address API.
The significant part of the story in the movie Inception is about going inside of a dream; inside of a dream. This kind of what I am doing now with the Flow Flex Card component we are launching a screen flow from a screen flow a little bit like Inception.
I used to handle this functionality using a combination of two Lightning Web components, along with an apex page and an aura app in one of those LWC’s. This is no longer the case with the added functionality of lightning-flow in the Salesforce Winter 23′ release we can now launch a screen flow directly from an LWC. With the new functionality, I am able to handle this now with a single child LWC in Flow Flex Card.
Why fix what’s not broken? A couple of things here I think good developers and architects always want to build something that is easily maintained and scalable Flow Flex Card has had a lot of evolution since I volunteered to be on the project it has experienced my own learning journey so I wanted to make it easier for other developers to contribute to the component as well as make it easier on myself when troubleshooting issues with users. It also moves the component to be based all on LWC versus a combination of Aura and LWC improving performance and expanding the possibility to do more in the future. There were also some issues when Flow Flex Card was deployed on an Experience Cloud Site with enhanced domains that required some changes in the fsc_ScreenFlow component that could become an annoying maintenance task in the future if Salesforce were to change domain behavior again.
Let’s break down the before and after of what this looks like.
As you can see in the diagram above I was able to significantly reduce the amount of code and components needed to launch a screen flow from within the Flow Flex Card component. I replaced the need for fsc_screenFlow with the standard OOTB lightning-flow delivered as part of the Salesforce Winter 23′ release. With just a simple update to the HTML file and a few items in the js, I was able to greatly reduce my tech debt and open up for further capabilities in the future i.e. custom finish and navigation behavior (more to come on that in a couple of months)
Resources and Learn More
MuleSoft Robotic Process Automation (RPA) gives you the power to automate business processes that usually require human input and interact with systems that don’t have an API, extending the reach of Salesforce’s process automation capabilities by integrating these RPA processes into flows in Salesforce as of Winter ’23!
Use MuleSoft RPA Manager to publish REST APIs for your RPA processes to Anypoint Exchange, which you can then register as External Services in Salesforce and invoke from low-code tools like Flow Builder.
This post describes the configuration steps necessary to invoke a MuleSoft RPA Process in Flow Builder. It assumes familiarity with MuleSoft RPA, Named Credentials and External Credentials, Permission Sets, External Services, and Flow Builder.
Step 0: MuleSoft RPA Pre-requisites
MuleSoft RPA Manager: User Management page
Steps 1-3: Connect Salesforce to MuleSoft Anypoint Platform
These steps create the initial connection between MuleSoft Anypoint platform and your org:
Note: the ability to create a ‘Legacy’ named credential is still supported, although it will be discontinued in a future release, at which point, this portion of the instructions will be updated to reflect the new capability.
Salesforce: Named Credentials Home Page
Step 4: Create a Named Credential (Runtime) and External Credential
Note: MuleSoft RPA authenticates clients invoking RPA processes through API keys. The Salesforce Winter ’23 release includes new functionality in Named Credentials and External Credentials that supports this type of authentication.
Example
Salesforce: External Credentials Detail Page
Example
Salesforce: New Named Credential Window
Example
Salesforce: External Credentials Detail Page
Step 5: Register the MuleSoft RPA API as an External Service
As you are configuring the external service, recall that you created two named credentials.
Example
Example
startProcess and getProcessExecutionStatus operations for the MuleSoft RPA API.Example
Step 6: Invoke a MuleSoft RPA Process in a Flow
Create Resource for RPA Process Input Variables
Tip: In step 2, when creating a New Resource to store the input variables for the RPA process, you can obtain the External Service Name and Apex Class Name from the External Services Detail Page to help configure the New Resource
Salesforce: External Services Detail Page
Assign Values to RPA Process Input Variables
Tip: In step 3, you can obtain the information about each variable/input parameter that needs to be defined in the above Apex class from the External Services Detail Page as well as the OpenAPI specification (a few examples shown below).
RPA Process OpenAPI Specification
OperationId: startProcess > ProcessExecutionWithExecutionId
ProcessExecutionWithExecutionId > ProcessExecution
ProcessExecution > inputArguments
Are you tired of having to delete inactive versions of Flows and Process Builders one at a time?
I’ve refactored my Flow and Process Builder List View with Batch Delete Application to use the latest versions of Datatable and the Flow Base Packs.
Taking advantage of the Datatable’s ability to select multiple records and pass them along in a Flow to be acted upon, I created a Flow Action that interfaces with the Metadata API and handles the batch deletion of selected inactive Flows and/or Process Builders.
Using data pulled from three different Salesforce internal objects, I’m able to display details about Flows and Process Builders. The full power of the Datatable component comes into play by offering a List View with sorting, highlighting, filtering and more.
I’ve bundled all of this together in an App that includes a configurable List View, List View with batch selection for delete and a Flow Picker where you can select a single Flow or Process Builder and then work with a List View of all of its active and inactive versions.
If you have a Sandbox that has been updated to Winter 23 Patch 12 you may run into an issue with the Datatable component where you will get an error if you edit any rows or if you select just a single row. Salesforce is working on an underlying issue in Version 3 of the Flow Runtime, but in the meantime you can update Datatable to avoid this issue and fix a couple of other minor bugs.
The error message you’ll see could be similar to one of these:
The Lightning Component c:datatable generated invalid output for field outputSelectedRow. Contact your administrator with these details: Flow encountered an error when processing and converting between data types. Please check the flow and ensure all data types are matched correctly.
The Lightning Component c:datatable generated invalid output for field outputEditedRows. Contact your administrator with these details: Flow encountered an error when processing and converting between data types. Please check the flow and ensure all data types are matched correctly.
Get the latest version here: https://unofficialsf.com/datatable-lightning-web-component-for-flow-screens-2/#Installation
Being able to pop up a screen flow when something happens can be very useful. Previous explorations include the Detect and Launch component, which focuses on being on a record page and detecting changes to that record. Mun’s solution uses platform events as a transport mechanisms, so it’s a more broadly applicable solution.
Renato has built a package that exposes the main Business Hours functions that are normally only available to Apex developers:
Here are the actions:
V1.0.0 10/23/22 Production Sandbox – First release
Old Versions
This is in regard to this known issue.
This bug is in very old Email Alert code and Salesforce is not prioritizing work in that part of the code base. Here’s a fairly straightforward workaround that replaces the Email Alert with a Send Email action in a flow.
For this workaround, we’ll use the exact starting conditions found in the Known Issue. However you can apply this to other scenarios where Email Alert is showing this unwanted behavior.
Let’s assume that you want your Approval Process to Set the Owner of a Case to a Queue. You want email to go out to the Queue Email but not the full set of Queue members. Email Alert is broken here. It sends too many emails out. So, instead of adding an Email Alert to your Approval Process, Create this Record-Triggered Flow:
Note the checkbox outlined in red. In order to call actions like Send Email on a Record-Triggered Flow, you need to use the ‘Asynchronous’ path.
Next, place a Send Email Action on that path:
However, we’re not quite done. We need to do a Get Records on the Queue to extract the Queue Email:
Here’s the final flow:
Now we can set the recipient of the Send Email action to be the Queue Email field from the Queue:
In the above example, I just threw some placeholder text into Body and Subject, but you can create a Text Template in Flow and add merge fields to add useful information into the Email. You can also add a URL that takes the user back to the case.
All API calls into Salesforce endpoints require an authorization. Generally, the SessionId will suffice for this, allowing you to avoid having to set up Auth Providers and Named Credentials just to make an API call to your own org. However, for security reasons, it’s tricky to get the SessionId from Apex.
I’m not sure why the following mechanism works, when all other mechanisms do not work, but I believe this mechanism is here to stay.
First, I’ll give you the most direct way to use this solution.
String sessionId = Test.isRunningTest() ? 'TEST_SESSION_ID' : Page.usf3__GenerateSessionIdForLWC.getContent().toString();You can then use the sessionID in your outbound HTTP Request:
HttpRequest req = new HttpRequest();
req.setEndpoint(endpoint);
req.setMethod('GET');
req.setHeader('Content-Type', 'application/json');
req.setHeader('Authorization', 'Bearer ' + sessionId);
req.setHeader('Accept-Encoding', 'gzip, deflate, br');
req.setHeader('Accept', '*/*');FlowActionsBasePack isn’t actually doing much work here, and you don’t need to use it; you can simply replicate what it does. To do that you have to first understand what’s really going on.
If you look at the line of code, you can see that the main function is a call to Page.usf3__GenerateSessionIdForLWC
As you can see in this screen shot of FlowActionsBasePack, ‘GenerateSessionIdForLWC’ is a tiny Visualforce page:
It took a surprising amount of web searching to find documentation on using ‘Page’ in Apex. I finally found it here. Page is used to instantiate a PageReference, which is how Apex interacts with Visualforce pages. ‘usf3__’ is the namespace used by all the code in FlowActionsBasePack. So our code basically calls getContent() on the page you can see in the image above. And the only content on the page is a reference to the SessionID.
So, another way you can attack this problem is to create your own Visualforce page on your org. You could name it GenerateSessionIdforLWC but of course you don’t need to. Use the <apex:page> block as shown above and save your page. From then on, any of your apex code can get the SessionId with a single line of code.