Flows Work with Experience LWR Sites (and why “Navigate Everywhere” and “Open URL” Don’t Work There Yet)

/0 Comments/in /by

For several years, Experience Cloud has been developing an LWR-based foundation for Experience Sites. LWR stands for Lightning Web Runtime, and it uses Salesforce’s more modern Lightning Web Components instead of the older Aura technology.

Building sites in LWR makes sense because LWR provides a significantly faster page loading experience and because LWC is the future of Salesforce’s component strategy. Not everything that’s available to be added to Experience Cloud pages is available on the new LWR site foundation. That’s because one of the key rules of LWR that enables it to be high-performance is that you can only use it with LWC-based components. You can’t use older Lightning Components (all of which are written using Aura).

Salesforce is in the middle of a multi-release effort to bring LWR sites to feature parity with older Experience technology. One milestone was hit. Recently, in Summer ’22, Salesforce upgraded the Experience Cloud Flow lightning component (also referred as the Flow ‘runtime’) so that it works on LWR Sites. As a result of this, you can now embed flows freely in LWR-based sites as long as they don’t contain any Aura components or local actions.

At this point, all Salesforce ‘Out-of-the-box’ screen components except Image and File Upload have been converted to LWC. You may wish to use the Improved File Upload Component if you want to upload files in an LWR-hosted Flow.

There are many custom Flow screen components written in Aura. As an example, the UnofficialSF Lookup component was written in Aura and no one has yet created an LWC version of it, whereas Datatable and QuickChoice are currently LWC-based, and will work in LWR Sites.

If you try to embed a flow in a page that’s part of an LWR site, and the flow doesn’t work, check the screen components for the presence of custom components and inspect them to see if they’re Aura based.

Local Actions Do Not Yet Work in Flows Running in LWR Sites

Some useful extensions, including Navigate Everywhere, Open URL, and Update Screen, are implemented as Flow Local Actions. The current implementation of Flow Local Actions uses Aura technology and so, as you’d expect, Local Actions do not currently work in LWR Sites.

Salesforce is working on upgrading Local Actions to work with LWC. At that point, it will be possible to upgrade actions like Navigate Everywhere so that they’ll work in LWR.