This package contains new Flow actions that are designed to manipulate any SObject or collection of SObjects. This means that in one Flow you might use them with a collection of Accounts and in another flow a collection of Leads.

This Post was most recently updated on: 3/18/24

Current Version 3.2.2

Fixed intermittant test class error (index out of bounds) from the ReturnNRandomRecords component

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v3.2.2 – 3/18/24 – Eric Smith – Production Sandbox
Fixed intermittant test class error (index out of bounds) from the ReturnNRandomRecords component

12/14/23 Version: 3.2.0

• Added a new Return N Random Records action (Derek Camp)
• Added a new Convert to/from CSV String and Text Collection (Eric Smith) *also available as a reactive screen component

9/13/23 – Eric Smith – Reactive Screen Components
I am making some of the actions also available as reactive screen components. See this article for more information.

• Extract Strings From Collection (With Dedupe)
• Collection Calculate

10/22/23 – Eric Smith – Added 4 new Collection Actions as Reactive Screen Components

• Filter Collection
• Find Common and Uncommon Records
• Join Collections
• Sort Collection

12/14/23 – Eric Smith – Added new Collection Action as a Reactive Screen Component

• Convert to/from CSV String and Text Collection

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*Available as a Reactive Screen Component

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Note: If you are defining record collection variables in your flow and do not assign any value to them, many of these actions will fail with a “Missing required input parameter” when called from the flow. If there is a chance that your flow logic could bypass any assignment to the variable, be sure to add an Assignment element setting the collection variable to nothing before calling the action.

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Install Current Version

Installation links at the bottom of this page.

Video Demo

Notes on Dynamic Inputs

Keep in mind that you can insert mergefields as dynamic inputs in these actions. A mergefield takes the form of a reference name surrounded by braces and an exlamation point: {!myUpstreamVar}. So for example, you can use Map Collection like this:

“Rating” : “Warm”, “Industry” : “Banking“

or like this:

“Rating” : “Warm”, “Industry” : “{!myUpstreamVar}“

To get the syntax right, use this rule: Flow Builder will replace everything between braces before passing the inputs to the invocable action.

Add or Insert Record

Takes as input a collection of records and a single record, and an optional index value. Returns the combined collection. If the index value is specified and is less than the length of the inputCollection, the

Inputs

List<SObject> inputCollection;

SObject inputRecord

Integer index

Outputs

List<SObject> outputCollection;

*Collection Calculate

Allows Add, Multply, and Average aggregate operations across a collection of records.

See documentation

*Convert to/from CSV String and Text Collection

See original documentation

Copy Collection

Takes as input a collection of records and returns the collection as output, allowing a new variable or reference to have the same value

Inputs

List<SObject> inputCollection;

Outputs

List<SObject> outputCollection;

Count Records And Fields

Takes a collection of records and returns a count. Optionally also takes a field name and a field value, and then also counts the number of records that have that particular value for that particular field. Returns both the number of matches and the total number of records. Added in V

Inputs

List<SObject> inputCollection;

String fieldName;

String fieldValue;

Outputs

Integer totalNumber

Integer matchedNumber

String errors

Dedupe Record Collection

Returns a set of de-duped records based on the field you specify. More Information

DeepClone

Clones a record and one or more sets of its child related records. More Information

*Extract Strings From Collection (with Dedupe)

Takes a collection and a field name, and returns a list of strings reflecting the values of those fields for the records. For example, if you pass in a list of Contacts and a fieldName of “Id”, you’ll get back a list of recordIds for the contacts.

Features

• Extract a text collection or comma-separated string of any field for each record in a Record Collection
  • Particularly useful for Ids, Picklists, Multi-select picklists
• Optionally de-dupe the values returned from all of the records.
  • Supports Multi-select picklists across all records in the collection
• Useful when paired with the new AddQuotesToFields and ExecuteSOQL actions to pass in a set of strings wrapped in quotes
• Ex. Select Name, Email from Contact where Id in (‘003023044333sDl’, ‘003023044333sKF’)

Inputs

• inputRecordCollection
  • List of records to extract field values from
• fieldAPIName;
  • API Name of the field you want returned
• dedupeValues;
  • If true only unique values will be returned. The default value is true

Outputs

• fieldValueCollection
  • Extracted fields in a text collection
• fieldValueString;
  • Extracted fields in a comma-separated text variable

*Filter Collection

Filters a collection against a formula string which can be created by an included Expression Builder Flow Screen Component.

Inputs

List<SObject> inputCollection;

String formula;

Outputs

String errors;
List<SObject> outputCollection;

Details

For each member of the inputCollection, this action will evaluate the provided formula and add the member to the outputCollection if the formula is true.

The formula must be a string that can be processed by the Salesforce formula engine. The actual engine that evaluates this string is written in Apex and is included in the Collection Processors package.

It will use the recordId of the current member as context, replacing expressions in the formula string of the form $Record.fieldname. For example, if the formula is ‘$Record.Age__c > 21’ and the input Collection is a collection of Student__c, the evaluator will do the following:

Loop through the collection of Student records. For each record:

1. use its ID and retrieve the record
2. retrieve the values of any fields present in the formula string
3. use the formula evaluator to evaluate the formula
4. If the formula evaluates to true, add the current record to the output collection

Also see ‘Notes on Dynamic Inputs‘ at the top of this post.

Find Record in Collection

Returns all records from the inputCollection that have a field with name targetField that has a value of targetValue. Pass in the name of the object in targetObject (for example, if the inputCollection is a List of Contacts, set targetObject to Contact. There’s probably a way to determine this automatically but it’s not implemented in the action at this time). If there’s just a single result, the result is returned as singleOutputMember. Otherwise it’s returned as multipleOutputMembers. Version 1.20+: MultipleOutputMembers returns null if there are no results

Inputs

List<SObject> inputCollection;

String targetObject

String targetField

String targetValue

Outputs

SObject singleOutputMember;

List<SObject> multipleOutputMembers

*Find Common and Uncommon Records

Compares & Contrats two record collections – even different sObject Types!

Post here

Generate Collection Report

Given a collection and a comma-separated list of field names, generates a string that includes all of the field values for every member of the collection. There are now two modes you can use. displayMode ‘simple’ simply throws the information out in simple groups. Useful for some debugging. displayMode ‘table’ generates HTML table markup that’s great for insertion into emails:

For full information on this action, see this post.

Inputs

List<SObject> inputCollection;
String shownFields	a comma-separated list of the fields you want to show in the table. Make sure to use the full api names, including ‘__c’ for custom fields.
displayMode	‘simple’ or ‘table’. defaults to simple
tableStyleString	will be inserted into the table html as a style attribute: <table style=”[tableStyleString]”>
headerStyleString	will be inserted into the <th> tags as a style attribute
rowStyleString	will be inserted into individual row tags (<tr>) as a style attribute
showHeader	Boolean

Outputs

String reportString

Get Child Collection

Takes a record and returns a specified collection of child records related to the input record.

Pass in either a record or a recordID (as a string), but not both. Specify the childRelationshipName, which should be the name of the child Object. Example. If you have an Opportunity and want to retrieve all of the OpportunityContactRoles associated with the input, specify a childRelationshipName of OpportunityContactRole. Note that this should also be specified as the Output Collection.

In childRecordFieldsCSV, specify the fields you want returned as a comma-delimited string. Example: Id,Name

For more information, see https://unofficialsf.com/automate-junction-updates-with-getchildcollection-and-getlookupcollection/

Inputs

SObject inputRecord;
String inputRecordId;
String childRelationshipName;
String childRecordFieldsCSV;

Outputs

List<SObject> childCollection;
String errorText;

Get First

Returns the first member of the inputCollection. The inputCollection is not modified by this action. Make sure that the types of your inputCollection and outputMember match.

Inputs

List<SObject> inputCollection;

Outputs

SObject outputMember;

Get Lookup Collection

Takes a collection of records and the name of an object related via a Lookup, and returns a collection of objects.

Pass in either a collection of records or a collection of string record ID’s. Pass in the name of the related object. Example: You start with a collection of OpportunityContactRoles and you want to get the Contacts associated with your OpportunityContactRoles via the ContactId Lookup field. In this case you would set lookupObjectName to Contact.

In lookupRecordFieldsCSV, specify the fields you want returned as a comma-delimited string. Example: Id,Name

For more information, see https://unofficialsf.com/automate-junction-updates-with-getchildcollection-and-getlookupcollection/

Inputs

List<SObject> inputCollection;
List<String> inputIds;
String lookupRecordFieldsCSV;
String lookupObjectName;

Outputs

List<SObject> lookupCollection;
String errorText;

Get Records from Ids

The Collection Actions package of utility actions now has a new action that takes a collection of recordIds (i.e. a List of Strings) and returns the corresponding records. It carries out a SOQL query and obtains the fields that you specify by name. The records are returned both as a collection of records and a serialized (JSON) string.

Inputs

String objectName;
String fieldNames;
global List<String> inputIds;

Outputs

List<SObject> records

String recordString

More information.

*Join Collections

Takes two collections (of the same type, please!) and returns their union as a single collection.

Inputs

List<SObject> inputCollection1;

List<SObject> inputCollection2;

Outputs

List<SObject> outputCollection;

Map Collection

Takes a collection and a set of key value pairs. Example:

“Rating” : “Warm”, “Industry” : “Banking“

Goes through the collection and changes each field with a name matching the key to the specified value.

Note that dynamic inputs are supported: “Rating” : “Warm”, “Industry” : “{!myUpstreamVar}“. See above for more.

NOTE: this currently only works for string values.

Inputs

List<SObject> inputCollection;

String keyValuePairs;

Outputs

List<SObject> outputCollection;

String errors;

Map Collection supports mapping of Time fields.

Example:
The Account object has a time field, and you want to use that time field on every case created. You can get the time variable from the Account and convert that to a string by using a formula, TEXT(Account.TIME). Then use that formula variable to assign that to the case.

Remove Record from Collection

Takes a collection and an index integer. Uses the Apex List class remove method to remove the member of the collection at the index location.

Inputs

List<SObject> inputCollection;

Integer index;

Outputs

List<SObject> outputCollection;

Return First N Records from Collection

Takes a collection and an integer count and returns that count of records from the beginning of the collection. The entire collection will be returned if it doesn’t contain more records than the record count attribute.

Inputs

List<SObject> Input Collection;

Integer Record Count;

Outputs

List<SObject> Output Collection;

Integer Return Count;

Return N Random Records from Collection

Documentation

Takes a collection and an integer count and returns that count of records randomly from the collection. The entire collection will be returned if it doesn’t contain more records than the record count attribute.

Inputs

List<SObject> Input Collection;

Integer Record Count;

Outputs

List<SObject> Output Collection;

Integer Return Count;

*Sort Collection

Takes a collection and a sortKeys string formatted as key value pairs (example:

“Name”:”ASC”,”Rating”:”Warm”

Known Issues:

1. Picklist fields are not supported.
2. If some of the records in your collection have a blank value for the field you’re sorting on, it will display the blank ones first no matter which direction you sort
3. The sorting priority is reversed from what I would have thought. It sorts first on the last key pair and then works backwards to the first.

Inputs

List<SObject> inputCollection;

String sortKeys;

Outputs

List<SObject> outputCollection;

Upsert

Upsert will either save or update a collection, depending on whether the collection already has ID’s

Attribute	Type
inputCollection	List<SObject>
inputRecord	SObject
externalIdFieldName	String
allOrNone	Boolean
serializedRecordData	String. This should be a JSON string of key value pairs where the keys are the names of fields on a single object. for example: {‘AnnualRevenue’: ‘400000’, ‘Rating’: ‘Hot’}
objectName	String. the name of the object that the serialized key value pairs belong to. Example ‘Case’. Only used to classify a passed in serializedRecordData

For more info, see https://unofficialsf.com/create-or-update-with-the-new-upsertrecords-action/

Are you an Apex Developer?

Looking for a fun project? Consider one of these requested enhancements!

Name	What it Does	What should the inputs be?	What should the outputs be?	Suggested By	Discussion
EXAMPLE: Change Owner	Similar to Map Collection, but specialized for changing the owner field, and so a little easier to configure	Besides the input collection, a string that can either be a username or a user recordId	standard success vs. error return values
Limit X	Similar to the First collection, but allow user to specify how many records to return from the collection. For example, they can pass an sobject collection and have up to X number of records returned in a new collection.	record collection	updated record collection	Chris Van der Merwe
IN Clause	Pass two object collections and do IN comparison	record collection, record collection2, field to check from record collection, field to compare against record collection 2	record collection with records as result on IN Clause	Chris Van der Merwe	This comes up all the time, and is challenging for governor limits in flwo.
Object API Name From Record Id	Pass in a record id of any object and get back the Object API Name	record id	Object Name	Patrick Loughran	The code for this is written if it makes sense to publish.
Recaptcha Component	Use case				Available as a project!
Report Folder	Return a list of report folders	no inputs	return folder name and id
Report List	Return a list of reports	optional filter for folder id, report type, last view, last run	return report name, report format,
Record List from Report	Return a sobject collection of all the records on a specified report	input report id	sobject collection of records and fields on the report		Goal is to allow end-user to select a report of records that they defined using a report and perform a screen flow against those records. For example, mass create child records, mass update, mass delete etc
Record List from ListView	Return a sobject collection of all the records on a specified list view	input listview id	sobject collection of records and fields on the list view		Goal is to allow end-user to select a report of records that they defined using a list view and perform a screen flow against those records. For example, mass create child records, mass update, mass delete etc
Compare Collections and return unique and common values	Functionality to be the same as here, but for record collections.	Two collections	Three collections (common, unique to coll1, unique to coll2)	Peter Kaszas	I am using the datable from unofficialsf.com and would like to be able to get the difference between the total list and the selected list.
Slice A big collection (Take first N Records)	It takes an input sobject collection and spits out 2 collections based on the first N records of a number you provide, and puts the rest in another collection	One sObject Collection	Two sObject Collections	Adam White	Many times it is useful to chunk out operations to abide by Salesforce limits – it’s especially useful in Screen flows when its easy to maintain limits by keeping tabs on your DML and then letting the user hit ‘Next’ if Flow detects you’re approaching a limit. This would be a handy action to have for that
Output formula value for each record in Collection	1. Return value from a formula input using available columns in an sObject Collection Variable 2. Add values to a Collection Variable 3. Optional: output unique values	One sObject Collection Variable	One Collection Variable	Rick Haag	Formulas fields are often created for the purpose supporting automation and are not shared via the UI to users. This option can reduce the overhead of multiple formula fields in place soley for the purpose of automation.
Support Apex Defined Objects	Update the processors to support Apex Defined Objects in addition to SObjects	One Apex Defined Collection Variable	One Apex Defined Collection Variable	Eric Smith
Map more than strings	Add at least number and date to the mapping.	I suppose the tricky bet is how to describe the value of the mapping pair. I suggest leaving it as text and converting to number and converting to date inside the map code.		Terry Cole	Mapping of text area works. Mapping of picklist value works (from string). Mapping of long text area seems to generate fault. Mapping of number (from string) and date (from string) runs but does not make changes.
Count Records and Fields	Documentation says field and value are optional, but screen configuration shows them as required				Just wants a quick count. Can so with collection count feature of assign, however. Just wanted cleaner solution.
Minimum date	Insert a list of dates, and returns the minimum. Quite cumbersom via formulas, seems easier in apex	Collection of dates
Strip Nulls	Remove null records from a record collection	Collection of sObject records	New collection of sObjects with null records removed	Charles Thompson	Anything you can do to avoid a loop is great! As it is, to remove null records, it appears you have to compare each record against a single record variable (of the same sObject) that has not been initialised.
Get Child Collections	Pass in a *collection of records* and get a single collection of *the children of all of the input records* of a particular object type	1) Collection of object records (or list of IDs) 2) Name of child object	Collection of records of the object type specified	Rachel Beach	Basically “Get Child Collection” but you can pass in a list of records rather than having to create a loop and call the action for each parent record
Get Records where Field in Collection	Get all records where a field is equal to one of the values in a collection (select * from [object] where [field] IN [input collection])	1) Name of object 2) Name of lookup field 3) Collection of record IDs	Collection of records of the object type specified	Rachel Beach	Not sure if this needs to be different for lookup fields vs other types of fields but I personally want it for a lookup field

Installation

Install Prerequisites

Before installing this component, you need to have in your org the Screen Component and Action Base Packs.
Install those here

Current Release

v3.2.2 – 3/18/24 – Eric Smith – Production Sandbox
Fixed intermittant test class error (index out of bounds) from the ReturnNRandomRecords component

Old Versions

v3.2.1 12/20/23 Production Sandbox Contains additional tests and cleanup courtesy of Jeroen Burgers

v3.2.0 – 12/14/23 – Eric Smith – Production Sandbox

• Added a new Return N Random Records action (Derek Camp)
• Added a new Convert to/from CSV String and Text Collection (Eric Smith) *also available as a reactive screen component

3.1.1 5/14/23 Production Sandbox

• Added Return First N Records action
• Changed api version on DeepClone down to 42to keep it working

3.0.4 10/10/22 Production Sandbox – improvements to FindCommonAndUncommon and MapCollection

3.0.3 Unmanaged 4/21/22 (Production or Dev)

3.0.3 Unmanaged 4/18/22 (Sandbox)

3.0.1 Unmanaged 4/18/22 (Production or Dev)

3.0.1 Unmanaged 4/18/22 (Sandbox)

3.0.0 Unmanaged 4/17/22 (Production or Dev)

3.0.0 Unmanaged 4/17/22 (Sandbox)

1.34 Unmanaged 2/25/22 (Production or Dev) – bug fix for upsert

1.34 Unmanaged 2/25/22 (Sandbox)

1.33 Unmanaged (GetRecordsFromIDs now additionally outputs records as a JSON string)

1.32 Unmanaged (enhances Upsert to support JSON record data)

1.31 Unmanaged (adds support to Map Collection for mapping numeric fields )

1.30 Unmanaged (bug fix)

1.29 Unmanaged (adds permission set 6-19-21)

1.28 Unmanaged (adds CollectionCalculate 5-23-21)

1.27 Unlocked (add Dedupe Records)

1.25 Unlocked (add Get Records from Ids 3-8)

1.23 Unlocked (add Find Uncommon and Common 2-13)

1.20.2 Unlocked (some bug fixes)

1.20.1 Unlocked (adds bulkification to remaining unbulkified actions)

1.19.3 Unmanaged (fix bug in Generate Collection Report)

View Source

Source

I’m pleased to share some of the upcoming highlights of Spring ’20.

Trigger on Record Change Events

Flow Builder now allows you to trigger on record changes, but there’s a catch: in Spring ’20, our support extends to “Before Save” triggers but not “After Save” triggers. The practical ramification of this is that when you trigger on a record change in Spring ’20, you’re going to be limited in the Flow elements you have access to. Here’s what the palette looks like:

Note the absence of Update Records and Create Records. “Before Save’ triggers require a bit of a shift in thinking. The best way to think about “Before Save” triggers is that they allow you to do one thing really well: modify the record that caused the trigger to fire. The key is understanding what’s implied by the words “Before Save”: Flow gets notified when the triggering record is starting to get saved, giving you a chance to make changes to that specific record before the save actually happens. The saving will happen automatically after the flow ends, and so there’s no Update Records.

Because of this special location in the save order, you get positive and negative effects. The main positive effect is performance: Before-Save triggers carry out field updates 10x faster than the standard Process Builder trigger (which is an ‘After-Save’ trigger). The downside is that you don’t get access to Actions and Subflows and you can’t update related (or unrelated) records.

Access the new triggers by double clicking on the Start element in Autolaunched Flows:

We’re working on building out additional triggering capability for delivery in 2020.

Flow Simplification – Automatic Field Discovery and Automatic Output Handling for Actions and Create Record

Flow Simplification is a major multi-release campaign that focuses on making flows easier and faster to build. In Spring ’20, the big announcement is the elimination of the much disliked requirement to specify, in the Get Records element, the entire set of fields that you want to use later in the Flow. That’s over now. Flow automatically detects the fields you use and makes sure to retrieve them. Note that you can still choose to specify these fields manually, and for existing flows, we stay in this new ‘manual’ mode rather than try to do any conversions.

Automatic Output Handling was introduced in Winter ’20 for Get Records and screen components. It is now supported in Actions and Create Records as well.

Invocable Actions can use Generic SObjects with Flow

This enabling technology allows the construction of invocable actions that are designed to operate on any sObject, or any collection of sObjects, that are passed in to them. As a non-developer, you’ll experience the benefit of this in the form of a range of highly-useful new Flow Actions that work on any collection you throw at them. Here are some unofficial actions that we’re experimenting with:

Note that in the image above, although some of the actions are labeled with the word “Account”, those actions are actually called things like Sort Collection and Remove First Record, and can be used in the next flow over against Leads, or your custom objects. In most cases, you _can_ already do these things in Flow, but you often have to set up loops, assignments and updates, and these actions eliminate all of those steps.

As a user of these actions, you play an important role in declaring which specific Sobject or SObject type you’re going to use for this particular action.

For example, in the Flow above, the Sort action has been configured to sort accounts. Suppose that you want to use it to sort a custom object called BakedGoods__c. When you drag it onto the canvas, you start by declaring the specific objects you’re going to assign to each generic attribute. You initially see this:

The declaration has to be completed before the rest of the inputs and outputs are displayed:

An unmanaged package of collection actions is available for installation here on Spring ’20 orgs.

Invocable Actions can provide Custom Property Editors (PILOT)

You will be able to request from Support that your org be enabled for this pilot, which allows invocable actions to use custom property editors. In the slide below, you can compare the baseline, one-size-fits-all property editor that is provided to all actions with a custom property editor built for an Update Field action:

Internal Salesforce teams are already working on sophisticated applications of this, such as this specialized Email action being built for a marketing application that uses Flow:

Run Flows in System Mode

Set your flow to run in system context with sharing. The flow still respects org-wide default settings, role hierarchies, sharing rules, manual sharing, teams, and territories, but it ignores object permissions, field-level access, and other permissions of the running user.

Additional Goodies

Multi-level Field Traversal

You can now traverse through multiple levels of related records/lookups in Flow Builder popup menus:

Deactivate from inside of Flow Builder

Conditional Field Visibility now immediately detects newly created screen fields

Improvements to Keyboard Shortcuts – Click on the canvas and type ‘/’ to see the updated list of available shortcuts

Improved searching in the Toolbox

In Spring ’19 Salesforce added a Printable View button to many Standard and all Custom Objects. The Printable View includes the current user’s page layout and related lists. What it does not include are any Posts that users have added to the Chatter Feed.

In this Blog Post, I’ll show you how to add a button to your Lightning Record Page that will create your Printable View including Chatter Posts.

This post covers how to add this capability to the Case object. You can apply all of these same steps to support this feature in other objects of your choice.

The first step is to add a custom field to Case to store the details from the Chatter Posts.

Here I create a Rich Text field called Case Chatter Feed with a default length of 32,768 characters.

The next step is to update my Page Layout to include this new field. In this example, I have also added a new Section to put it in.

Now, when I want to create a new Printable View of my record, I must first populate this field with the current content of the record’s Chatter Feed. I can handle this step by running a Flow. The only attribute I need to pass into this Flow is the record ID (varCaseId) from the Case page.

In this body of this Flow I get all of the user created Chatter Posts and Comments and insert them into my new custom field. Later in this post I will show you how the first and last steps in this Flow tie everything together.

In the first Get Records step, I get all Feed Item records related to the Case and specify the fields I will be using later in the Flow.

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I then Loop through each of those Feed Items by referencing the collection variable {!Get_Feed_Item_Records} that was automatically created by the Get Records step. Here I also create a new single Record variable {!loopFeedItem} to store each record inside of the loop.

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In the Decision step, I skip any Feed Items records with a blank body. This way I’m only processing user created posts. You can modify this logic if you want to include more details.

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Because the Feed Item records only include the user’s ID, I use a Get Records step to get the user’s name to include in my Chatter Feed field.

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In the Assignment step, I build out each of the Feed Item fields I want to show as part of the Post as well as the formatting of the information. This is done by using the Add operator to build out the full feed one piece at a time.

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We end up turning this from the Chatter Feed:

Into this in our custom field:

I’ve used a combination of Formula resources and Text Template resources to build out each post.

• ttLineSeparator (Text Template)
  • ~
    ~
• fSpaceSeparator (Text Formula)
  • ” | “

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For each Feed Item I do another Get Records to find any Feed Comments associated with the current Feed Item.

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I then Loop through each of those Feed Comments by referencing the collection variable {!Get_Feed_Comment_Records} that was automatically created by the previous Get Records step. Here I also create a new single Record variable {!loopFeedComment} to store each record inside of the loop.

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Just like I did with Feed Items, I skip any Feed Comments with a blank body in the Decision step.

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Because the Feed Comment records only include the user’s ID, I use a Get Records step to get the user’s name to include in my Chatter Feed field.

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I continue to build out my chatter posts field by adding Feed Comments and formatting in the Assignment step.

Here I’ve used some additional formatting variables.

• ttCommentSeperator (Text Template)
  • .
• fCommentIndent (Text Formula)
  • ” —– “

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After the Feed Comment Loop is completed, I add one more Assignment step to add a separator before the next Feed Item.

• ttItemSeparator (Text Template)
  • ______________________________________________________________________________________________

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After the outer Feed Item Loop is finally completed, I add one more Assignment step to cleanup the separations between the lines.

This is a little trick you can use to put line separators (Carriage Return, Line Feed) inside of a text field. Text Templates support separate lines but they can’t contain just a single separator so my ttLineSeparator Text Template includes a single special character on each line that get removed by my fFixCRLF Formula.

• ttLineSeparator (Text Template)
  • ~
    ~
• fFixCRLF (Text Formula)
  • SUBSTITUTE({!varBodyText},”~”,””)

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The last piece needed to get my Chatter Posts into the Case record so they can be displayed is to add an Update Records step to save the record with the newly built Chatter Feed details.

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Now I will show you how to add a couple more pieces to this Flow so we can use it on a Lightning Record Page and have it open a new Tab with the Printable View.

I want to put this Flow on the Case Lightning Record Page but I don’t want it to run until selected by the user. I handle this by adding a Screen to the beginning of the Flow that displays a custom image and waits until the user clicks on it before continuing with the rest of the Flow. Here I’m using the Image Button Flow Screen Component from unofficialsf.com. I’ve added the display, hover and pressed images for the button as Static Resources to my org so they can be referenced by the Image Button component. (Follow the Image Button link for complete documentation on this component)

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The final step in my Flow is an Action that opens a new Tab with the URL for the Printable View of the Case record. Here I’m using another component from unofficialsf.com. This one is the Open URL Flow Action. (Follow the Open URL link for complete documentation on this component)

The URL for the Printable View is created with a formula that combines the Base URL for the running org with the Case Record Id and the Printable View URL identifier.

• fPrintableViewURL (Text Formula)
  • LEFT({!$Api.Partner_Server_URL_340}, FIND(‘/services’, {!$Api.Partner_Server_URL_340})) & {!varCaseId} & “/p”

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All I need to do now is to activate then add this Flow to the Case Lightning Record Page and configure it to pass in the recordId to my varCaseId input variable.

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I’ve created a couple of Installation Packages for those who want to try this out in their orgs. The first package includes both the Image Button and Open URL components. That package will only install in your org if you have neither of those components already installed. The second package does not include those components and the provided Flow must be edited to access them. I’ve provided instructions in the Flow showing how to do that.

1 – Install Package with Custom Case Field, Components, Image Static Resources and Sample Flow

Production
Sandbox

Post Package Install Instructions

• Add the new field ( Case Chatter Feed ) to the Case Page Layout
• Activate the Flow ( Case – Printable View with Chatter Posts )
• Add the Flow to the Case Lightning Record Page

2 – Install Package with Custom Case Field, Image Static Resources and Sample Flow (No Components)

Production
Sandbox

Post Package Install Instructions

• Make sure you have the current version installed for the Image Button component
• Make sure you have the current version installed for the Open URL component
• Add the new field ( Case Chatter Feed ) to the Case Page Layout
• Edit the Flow ( Case – Printable View with Chatter Posts – Template )
  • See the instructions in the 2 Flow Screen elements
• Activate the Flow
• Add the Flow to the Case Lightning Record Page

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