Probably destined for the Academy Award for 2020 for Best Flow Short. Check it out!

This Post was most recently updated on: 1/11/25

Key Contributors: Nick Sauer, Clifford in Frankfurt

1/11/25: Thanks to Jeroen, this component is now reactive

9/21/24: Thanks to Declan, you can get a more accurate count by excluding HTML

4/16/23: Thanks to Clifford in Frankfurt, this extension now fully supports the ability to enable or suppress specific formats

Input Rich Text sports a nice toolbar and allow rich text creation. It also provides Find and Replace, Autoreplace, and Blocklists. As you can see below, these new features are available via a swanky bottom toolbar, and can be turned on or off as a group. Clifford in Frankfurt has added additional ability to control which features are enabled or suppressed.

Note that this isn’t the only choice you have. Here’s a powerful alternative extension to consider, with a different mix of features.

You can pass in a map of terms that you want to automatically replace.

How it Works:

Use Case Example:  Business has the need  to enter customer-facing details that:

1. Blocks users from entering certain sensitive words/symbols
2. Automatically applies Trademarks (™) or other company-specific terminology.
3. Allows for Find & Replace tool to correct mistakes

Summary:

IMPORTANT: Use enabledAdvancedTools = true input attribute if you want to leverage these enhanced features. Otherwise leave empty and regular input Rich Text component will be used.

1. Warn or Block Transition in Flow if disallowed words and/or symbols are present.
2. Find and Replace
3. Auto-Replace suggested words
4. Undo functionality for search/replace or suggested words
5. Character Count and Max Character limits.

Admin Instructions:

Enabling and Disabling Features in Flow:

1. Default function is regular rich text input field. To enable advanced features set enableAdvancedTools to true.
2. Setting label provides a field label for the rich text input.
3. Rich Text input/output is provided through the value attribute.

Configure the default Rich Text Features in Flow:

1. By default, all rich text features (called formats) like bold, italic, image etc. are enabled.
2. Optionally, specify the exact formats you want to allow by providing a comma-separated list with formats to the “Enabled Formats” attribute. Example: bold, image
3. Optionally, disable certain categories by providing a comma-separated list with categories to the “Disabled Categories” attribute. Example: INSERT_CONTENT, ALIGN_TEXT
4. The complete list of formats and categories can be accessed in the Input Rich Text documentation on: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/component-library/bundle/lightning-input-rich-text/documentation

Replace Text with Suggested Terms:

1. If autoReplaceMap is populated, then a button is shown to user.
2. Use autoReplaceMap to set up key:value pairs in JSON. Example: {“Test”:”GreatTest™”} a. When user employs the button, the key will be replace by value.

Managing Disallowed Words and Symbols:

1. If disallowedSymbols or disallowedWords is filled, then user will be notified while typing one of those words or symbols.
2. Both disallowedSymbols and disallowedWords accept a comma delimited string.
3. The default message will say ‘Error’ and provide the violating word/symbol. This will also give validation error if user tries to advance while error is still present.
4. To change the message to a warning only, and turn off the associated validation (allowing user to advance the Flow), set warnOnly attribute to true.

Character Counts and Limits:

1. Character count is off by default. Set characterLimit to an integer value to show character count and limit.
2. If warnOnly is not set when characterLimit is on, then the Flow Next/Finish cannot be used until resolved.

User Instructions:

1. While entering text in the Rich Text Area, if you use words or symbols that are flagged as not allowed, you will receive either a warning message or an error message. a. If the warning message is displayed, this is for notification only, and you will be able to proceed. b. If the error message is shown, this means you will need to correct the noted error prior to continuing. If you try to click Next/Finish, a validation message will be given.
2. To Search and Replace text, click on the magnifying glass icon. titled ‘Search and Replace’ a. A ‘Search Text’ field is displayed where you enter the text you want to find. b. A ‘Replace with Text’ field is shown where you enter the replacement text to be applied where the ‘Search Text’ is found. c. Use the ‘Check’ icon to commit the search/replace. d. Use the ‘Revert Last Change’ button that appears after search/replace to undo the changes just made. e. If you no longer want to use Search/Replace, you can click on the Magnifying Glass icon again to hide these fields.
3. To replace suggested terms set up by your admin, click on the Merge icon titled ‘Apply Suggested Terms’. Note this will only be shown if your admin has configured this. a. The component will find text to be replaced and overwrite with teh replacement term identified by your admin.
   b. Use the ‘Revert Last Change’ button that appears after search/replace to undo the changes just made.

Component Input Example:

Installation:

1.7 Unlocked 1/11/25 Production Sandbox – Reactivity added

Resources:

Source

Also see https://unofficialsf.com/copy-paste-of-images-in-flow/

Old Versions

1.6 Unlocked 9/21/24 Production Sandbox – Additional support for turning on formats

1.5 Unlocked 4/16/23 Production Sandbox – Additional support for turning on formats

1.4.1 Unlocked 7/3/21 (Production or Dev) 7/3/21 – Eric Smith – Added an * next to the Input Label when the Required attribute is True
1.4.1 Unlocked 6/3/21 (Sandbox)

1.4 Unlocked 6/25/21 (Production or Dev)
1.4 Unlocked 6/25/21 (Sandbox)

6/25/21 – Eric Smith – Added a Required attribute and adjusted the bottom margin to better match standard components

1.3 Unlocked 8/1/20

1.0.1

There are some powerful data structures that are currently available only through retrieval and deployment via the metadata API. For example, the Process Builder Converter tool works by first retrieving a process builder process as a piece of flow metadata, then editing the metadata so it can be opened in Flow Builder, and then deploying the modified flow metadata as a new, separate flow.

In general, using metadata deployment and retrieval is the last resort you should use. If your data is accessible via the UI API, the Tooling API, or via a REST interface, those are likely to be preferable. One reason is that metadata deployment may trigger a recompilation of all of the apex classes on your org, and that will pause your deployment until it’s finished. So while metadata deployment will generally go very quickly on developer edition orgs, it might be much slower on a production org. (As a note, you can control whether your metadata deployments trigger a recompilation with this checkbox:

Despite these issues, sometimes Metadata deployment is a great tool to use. The Process Builder example is a good one.

Another example involves creating, editing, and deleting ListViews via a Flow Action. While ListViews can be read via UI API and REST, they can only be created, edited, or deleted by doing metadata deployment of ListView metadata.

How to Incorporate Metadata Deployment and Retrieval

There are two sets of tools you can use to build Flow Actions and Screen Components that use Metadata Deployment and Retrieval.

Method 1: Assembling your Metadata Using Andy’s Objects

The first tool is the legendary Apex Metadata Service created by Andy Fawcett. This abstracts a lot of gnarly SOAP transactions into nice clean API’s. Here’s an example of a Flow Action making use of the Metadata Service to create ListViews:

The reason this works is that MetadataService has gone and created a wrapper class for each piece of Salesforce metadata. In the code above, you can see that we’re able to reference MetadataService.ListView(). Once we have one of the ListView objects, we can simply fill it with updated values, and then call createMetadata on it. There are similar methods for updating, deleting and reading.

You can peruse the vast set of available objects by scrolling through the main class file here.

Method 2: Assembling Your Metadata By Hand

When we went to create the process builder converter, though, we weren’t able to use the above method. The reason is that the current MetadataService only has updated metadata through API version 42, from 2017. We needed to create flow metadata that used brand new additions that had only been added in version 48.0

You can see here, that the Flow definition in Metadata Service (era 2017)…

lacks the brand new metadata element that stores new Flow triggering information:

Hopefully, someone will update the MetadataService to the latest API. In the meantime, you can solve this problem because the MetadataService also provides direct access to lower level deploy and retrieve methods that don’t require you to populate one of the metadata objects.

When you operate at this lower level, you have to directly parse and modify the metadata xml. Then you have to zip it up with base 64 encoding, and then you call MetadataService’s ‘deploy’ method directly. This has been implemented asynchronously, so we carry it out via a Flow screen component called TransferMetadata that can sit there on a flow screen and poll until a response is received.

While this may sound a little intimidating, you can just take and copy the code we used.

Introducing the MetadataService BaseLibrary

To streamline the efforts of developers who want to build tools like Create or Edit ListViews, we’ve packaged the necessary MetadataService files into a useful package that you can just require as a dependency. This package leaves out some extraneous files from the repo but has everything necessary to carry out deployment and retrieval.

In general we’re starting to move towards base libraries to avoid collisions and simplify packaging for new actions and developments.

Install it here.

June was a big month for Flow demo videos. First we had Summer ’20 Release Readiness Live, with special cameos by my mother-in-law’s dog, a baby, and a dubious plant.

A week later, at TrailheaDX, another Flow presentation was given. This one included a sneak preview of two upcoming blockbuster features: Multicolumn Screens and Autolayout Canvas.

Check it out!