Datatable with Row Actions calling a pop-up Screen Flow
Datatable with Row Actions calling a pop-up Screen Flow
Recently I wrote an article on how datatable row actions could be used to execute a Screen Action. This is a great feature if you need to perform some unattended actions on a record in the datatable.
But what if you need to provide some additional input or interact with the data in the actioned record? Action Buttons and Screen Actions can only run auto-launched flows, not screen flows.
I was able to work with Josh Dayment to enhance his new Flow Launcher action to launch a screen flow reactively instead of just from a button. We also added the capability of passing records and record collections in and out of the launched flow.
There will be many different use cases for this new capability, but this article highlights how you could combine Datatable and Flow Launcher to edit fields that aren’t natively supported for inline editing such as Lookup and Multi-Select Picklist fields.
Here’s the flow in action. Each time the row action button is clicked, a screen flow pops up allowing the user to edit some of the fields in the actioned record. When they click Save Changes, the datatable gets refreshed with the changed record.
This is a simple flow where you get a collection of Account records and present them in a Datatable on a reactive screen.
The reactive screen displays a Datatable with row actions enabled. 4 additional reactive actions are added to handle the additional processing. Each of these will be explained in more detail later.
- CP – Get First Record
Extract the single record from the collection of actioned rows provided by the datatable. - Flow Launcher – Sobject
Launch a screen flow that will allow the user to edit fields in the record provided by the Get First Record action. - CP – Upset Record By Key
Upsert the updated record from the screen flow into the current record collection. - CP – Reactive Record Collection
Provide the active record collection to be displayed in the Datatable and used by the Upsert action. If nothing has been processed yet, seed the flow with the original Get Records collection. Otherwise, return the collection provided by the Upsert Record By Key action.
When you first build this flow, set the input collection for the Datatable to be the collection of Accounts from the Get Records. You will come back later and update this once you add the other reactive actions to the screen.
Next, define the Row Action for the Datatable. Currently, there is only a Remove Row action so select that and restrict the number of actioned rows to 1.
The Remove Row action in the Datatable outputs a collection of records actioned by the user. In this case, the Datatable is configured to restrict the user to a single action at a time. The Get First Record component extracts the first record from the collection of Removed (Actioned) Rows from the Datatable so you have the single record you need to pass to the screen flow.
The Flow Launcher will fire by reacting to any changes in the record output by the Get First Record action which fires any time a new record is provided by the Datatable row action.
To configure the Flow Launcher component to launch the flow reactively, set the “Hide Launch Button” attribute to True (1). To have the flow pop-up in front of the Datatable, set the “Show Flow in Modal” attribute to True (2). You can select the size of the modal with the “Modal Size” attribute (3). Identify the flow to be launched by providing the active flow’s API name in the “Flow API Name” attribute (4). Identify which resource in the launched flow to pass the record to with the name of the input variable in “Subflow Input Variable Name” (5) and the record you are passing to that variable in “Launched Flow Input Attribute – Record” (6). You can force the user to complete the called flow instead of closing the modal manually, by setting the “Disable Close Icon” attribute to True (7).
The flow being launched takes the values in the input record and displays a screen with inputs for some of the record’s fields.
The field values from the input record are used as defaults for the inputs on the screen.
The Flow Launcher action is looking for an output attribute from the flow with a special name of OUTPUT_Record. You should create that as an output attribute in your screen flow and assign the values from the screen inputs to the OUTPUT_Record fields.
NOTE: You still want the calling flow to refresh even if the user doesn’t make any changes. You can force this by having a custom checkbox field on your record. The called flow will always change this value by setting it using this formula (fToggleChange).
The Upsert Record By Key component takes the modified record from the screen flow and upserts it back into the record collection by replacing the matching record in the collection with the new record values from the screen flow. The key field API name defaults to Id. Like you did with Datatable, you first need to configure this by referencing the original Get Records collection. This will be changed after you add the Reactive Record Collection component to the screen.
Finally, the Reactive Record Collection component acts like a reactive BLANKVALUE function for record collections. If the Input Record Collection hasn’t been populated yet, it uses the Alternate Record Collection to “seed” the original output from the component. In this flow, the collection is first seeded with the results of the Get Records flow element. After that, the record collection is the output from the Upsert Record By Key component. This output is used to provide the reactive record collection to both the Datatable component and the Upsert Record By Key component.
Now that the Reactive Record Collection component has been added to the screen, go back to the Datatable and Upsert Record By Key and change the Get Records collection to the output collection from the Reactive Record Collection component.
NOTE: CP – Get First Record, CP – Upsert Record By Key and CP – Reactive Record Collection are new actions I created and are available in version 1.0.3 or later of Reactive Screen Components. These also require version 3.2.4 or later of the Collection Processors.
I hope this example gives you some ideas for some other use cases for components like Datatables with Row Actions or Autolaunched Screen Flows or Reactive Collection Processors. Add your ideas to the comments.
