Every Flow is completely represented by a single piece of XML metadata, and you can download a Flow xml file, modify it, and redeploy it.

But of course, you don’t. Because it’s dangerous to hand-modify the XML. It’s easy to break things down there in the basement. So we try to provide Flow users with all the tools they’ll ever need right in Flow Builder and/or via public, well-defined APIs.

It is possible, though, to start with a flow (‘templateflow’), modify it using basic text parsing and substitution, and deploy the resulting flow (generated flow’).

Suppose that you resolved to start with an existing Flow XML file, and write some Apex code to modify it. You then deploy the modified version of the file up to an org, as a working generated Flow.

You are now programming Flows in Apex. So far so good.

Now suppose that you take that Apex code and turn it into an invocable action that you can insert into a Flow. You then create a Flow that gathers configuration data from a user using standard Flow screens, passes those inputs into your invocable action, and the invocable action then generates a Flow using the inputs the user provided? You now have a Flow Generator. You’re using Flows to generate other Flows. This is a powerful concept known as metaprogramming.

I did some experimentation this year with this, and have published a page of information about it here. There’s a repo you can look at with a working example of flow metaprogramming, used to generate custom Lead Conversion flows.

Consider another scenario: you want to change Flow Stages resources dynamically. Currently you can’t access them with conventional tools like Assignment elements. However, in a flow metadata file, they are simply represented like this:

<stages>
        <name>Stage1</name>
        <isActive>false</isActive>
        <label>Stage1</label>
        <stageOrder>1</stageOrder>
    </stages>
    <stages>
        <name>StageB</name>
        <isActive>false</isActive>
        <label>StageB</label>
        <stageOrder>2</stageOrder>
    </stages>

You could start with a template flow as your baseline, and then use a Flow Generator to read Custom Metadata values, swap in the values for things like the stages name element, and deploy the resulting customized flow.

Good hunting.

Narender builds on his “world’s first” blog post on invocable actions that use the new Spring ’20 generic SObject support with a new post that shows, for the first time, an action that carries out SOQL and can be used declaratively in any object scenario.

The heart of his action is this line:

string query = 'Select '+ queryParams[0].fieldsToQuery + ' FROM ' + queryParams[0].objectApiName + ' LIMIT ' + queryParams[0].numberOfRecords;

As you can see, that’s a SOQL query. Now you’ve always been able to do that with a Flow invocable action, but you always have had to get into the Apex code and specify the exact object you wanted to use. For example, when I posted this tutorial on injecting advanced soql into flows, you can see that my code specifically declared User and Contact variables.

But Narender’s code doesn’t have to do that. And that means that you can take his action and deploy it declaratively against any kind of input.

ForcePanda’s example, powerful though it is, only scratches at the surface of the powerful SOQL actions that will be packaged up into building blocks once Spring ’20 ships. And eventually, we’ll start seeing those actions with friendly configuration UI’s, powered by Custom Property Editors.

This builds on recent work Eric Smith did to expand the range of navigation choices available in a single, straightforward navigation action for Flow. Navigate Everywhere should be able to replace all of the previous navigation components. It provides support for navigation from a flow to:

• a record page (in edit or view mode)
• a new record form for an object
• a list view (object home page)
• a web page
• a related object list view
• an App page
• a custom Tab page
• a named page (examples include ”home”, “today”, “chatter” and a variety of community named pages)
• a Knowledge page

Note that this navigation component is still constrained by some basic limitations constraining navigation in Flow Builder. This will work in normal lightning experience flows, including flows launched from Quick Actions, but will not work when run from inside Flow Builder or via a Custom Button. It will not work from Visualforce pages.

Supported Destination Types

Destination Type = ‘Object’

Will navigate to a New record form or a List view. Note the use of DestinationActionFilter to pass in the name of a specific list view.

Destination Type = ‘Record’

Navigates to a specific recordId in either view or edit mode. Don’t use this Destination Type if you’re trying to create a new record (Use Destination Type = ‘Object’). DestinationAction is basically ignored for this DestinationType, and DestinationActionFilter is not used.

Destination Type = ‘App’

Navigates to an app. For DestinationName, use either the appId or appDeveloperName to the appTarget. The appId is the DurableId field on the AppDefinition sObject. The appDeveloperName value is formed by concatenating the app’s namespace with the developer name. To find the app’s developer name, navigate to the App Manager in Setup and look in the Developer Name column. For standard apps, the namespace is ‘standard__’. For custom apps it’s ‘c__’. For managed packages, it’s the namespace registered for the package.

DestinationAction and DestinationActionFilter are not used.

Destination Type = ‘URL’

Navigates to a specific url. Use the DestinationURL field.

DestinationName, DestinationAction, and DestinationActionFilter are not used.

Destination Type = ‘NamedPage’

Navigates to a specific Named Page. Use the DestinationName field.

In Lightning Experience and the Salesforce mobile app, possible values are:

• home
• chatter
• today
• dataAssessment
• filePreview

In Communities, the value for pageName is the URL value for a supported page. For instance, the default URL value for the Account Management page is /account-management, so the value for pageName would be account-management. The value of home is reserved for the landing page of any community in your org.

Supported pages in Communities are:

• Home
• Account management
• Contact support
• Error
• Login
• Top Articles
• Topic Catalog
• Custom pages

DestinationAction, and DestinationActionFilter are not used.

Destination Type = ‘tab’

Navigates to a specific tab. Use the DestinationName field and provide the unique name of a CustomTab. Visualforce tabs, web tabs, Lightning Pages, and Lightning Component tabs are supported.

DestinationAction, and DestinationActionFilter are not used.

Destination Type = ‘knowledge’

Navigates to a knowledge page. Destination URL is required. The value of the urlName field on the target KnowledgeArticleVersion record. The urlName is the article’s URL. DestinationName is ignored for Communities but required otherwise. Use the ArticleType API name of the Knowledge Article record for DestinationName.

DestinationAction, and DestinationActionFilter are not used.

Destination Type = ‘relatedlist’

Navigates to a related items page. Requires 1) a RecordId 2) a DestinationName like Case, 3) a RelationshipName like CaseComments and 4) a DestinationAction (which here has to be view)

Attributes

Install

Unmanaged Package 1.0

View Source

Source

Layouts often differ substantially from recordType to recordType and from profile to profile. This action takes a recordTypeId and a profileId and returns that combination’s current LayoutId. One use of this is dynamically generating flow screen layouts with the RecordDetail flow screen component. To do this, after using this action to retrieve a LayoutId, use the GetLayoutFields action to retrieve the list fo field names from that layout. You can then pass the list of field names to RecordDetail to generate a customized record detail right in your Flow screen that maps to the layout. To see this in action, check out this video.

Inputs

Outputs

Installation

Install this action as part of the QuickChoice managed package or just grab the source.

System Admin Tools Menu

Over time I have created a number of specialized Flows in my org for System Admins to help fix records or unwind certain processes.  I find these are a much safer way of keeping the data clean rather than trying to remember all the manual steps necessary to update records correctly.

To make it easier to select and run these specialized Flows I wanted to come up with a way to provide a menu of these tools to select from.  On unofficialsf.com, I found a simple Flow Screen Lightning Web Component that could display a list of Flows in the org and return the API Name of the selected Flow.

The first thing I did with this component (flowPickerFSC) was to enhance it by adding some additional attributes to make it more powerful and user friendly.  I added labels and help text for the configuration attributes, created a filter for the flow search, sorted the displayed list, updated the documentation and created install packages for Production and Sandboxes.

One way to use this component to run a flow is to add the OpenURL Flow Action component to the calling flow and pass the URL of the selected flow to it.  I show how this can be done on the documentation page for flowPickerFSC.

For my Admin Tools Menu I wanted to run my flows in place in a pop-up modal window.  Salesforce Labs has a nice app for this on the App Exchange called Launch Flow in Modal.

With just a few minor tweaks to this component, I was able to embed the Flow Picker LWC and use that to select and set the flow to be loaded in the pop-up modal window.

With these changes, my new component is ready to add to any Lightning Home, App or Record page.

1. – Any random text is OK here as the Flow Name will be reset by the LWC
2. – This is the standard Salesforce color for Brand (Dark Cerulean)

Here is the component in action:

Here’s hoping this inspires you to try something like this in your own org.

Follow these links for Installation and Source Code:

Source Code

flowPickerFSC

launchFlowModal

Install Packages

Lightning Web Component Bundles: flowPickerFSC

Aura Component Bundles:  ccp_launchFlowModal, ccp_renderFlow

Apex Classes: FlowListController, FlowListControllerTest

Production

Sandbox

Eric Smith – December 2019