Introducing: User-aware Record Type Picker for Flows
Update October 15, 2022: install links updated to latest version
Update September 26, 2022: install links updated to latest version
Next week is the year’s big Main Event: Dreamforce. For some of us, that means packing our things and scrambling to fill our session schedules, make meetup plans, and find the perfect dinner spot. For others, like me, an sense of impending FOMO.
Fortunately, the announcements made at Dreamforce, and the Winter 23 release just a few weeks after, will be for everyone, whether you make it in to San Francisco or not. If you’ve reviewed the release notes or scoped out your preview sandbox, one item you may notice is that the Dynamic Fields feature for Screen Flows will be Generally Available, and with that, picklist fields will be Record Type-aware. This means you can simply place a record variable’s picklist field on a screen, and if you’ve set the Record Type for that record, it will correctly display only the picklist values that are active for that Record Type. However, that Record Type must be set on the record variable before the Flow arrives on that Screen with the picklist. So, then: what options do we have today for letting a user select a Record Type?
Today’s Options for RecordType Selection in Flows
- You could build a Choice for each Record Type. That might work, but what if different users have a different permissions to different Record Types. Sounds like a pretty hairy mess to try to get right, and to maintain moving forward. Not a great option.
- You could do a Record Choice Set or a Collection Choice Set based on the RecordType object. Of course! Perhaps by setting the Screen Flow to run in User Mode, which respects a user’s access to records, we’ll only get the Record Types that the user has permissions for. If you’ve tried this, you’ll quickly learn that the RecordType object, which holds all each object’s Record Types, is not limited by the user’s permissions. If a user has read access to an object, they’ll have access to every RecordType for that object, even if they don’t have permission to create a record for that Record Type.
- The closest I could find is the GetRecordTypeInfo action in the UnofficialSF Flow Action Pack. Its a nifty action! But its a bit incomplete, as it requires you to pair it with another screen component, it won’t give you the Record Type Descriptions, and the Record Type information is provided in separate text collections, making it challenging to be able to use the selected option downstream in the Flow.
🎉 Welcome to the team, Record Type Picker 🎉
The Record Type Picker is an open-source, free-to-use component that can be used in Screen Flows to give users selectable choices of Record Types, automatically filtered to just the Record Types that the running user has access to!
Three display types
Visual Picker, Radio Group, Picklist, each with optional Show or Hide Descriptions
Optional Auto-Next Navigation on Select
Auto navigate on selection works best with the Visual Picker on a screen that doesn’t have any other inputs and has the footer and/or Next button hidden. When the user clicks on a selection, the Flow will automatically navigate to the next screen. It is also recommended to provide a “Previous” button on the next screen so that the user has a chance change their selection if they’ve made a mistake.
Easy configuration with a Custom Property Editor that has a Preview mode
Bonus Invocable Action
The package also comes bundled with an Invocable Action to get a Collection of RecordTypes available to the running user, in case you’d prefer to use other screen components like Collection Choices or Data Table
Install with Ease
This component does not depend on any other packages, and can be installed with an unlocked, namespaced package using the links below. The namespace means you don’t have to worry about conflicts with anything you’ve already got in your org, and being unlocked gives you the confidence that what you see in the source repo is what you get in the package.
Package version last updated: October 15 2022
Source
There are a handful of features that I’d like to add, but its at the point now that it should be pretty useful for anyone that needs this kind of thing. Take a look, and please add any issues or feature requests to the Issues log in the GitHub repo!
