Spring 22 Sneak Preview: Flow, Orchestrator & Next Best Action

Compiled this time as a collaboration between Alex Edelstein and Adam White.

Here’s what you can look forward to on Spring ’22. Try it out here: https://www.salesforce.com/form/signup/prerelease-spring22/

Salesforce Orchestrator Goes GA

New enhancements in Spring ’22:

Assignment to Queues and Groups
Work Items can be assigned to multiple users

Reassignment of Work Items
Allow users to reassign Work Items to others

Cancel a running orchestration
A run can be canceled from the list of runs

API access to trigger Orchestrations
Initiate an Orchestration via the Flow REST API

API access to monitor Orchestrations (Connect API)
Inspect running Orchestration instances

CI/CD & SFDX
All Orchestrator components can be deployed

Flow Support Has Been Extended to Standard Support Customers

Until now, technical support for Flow required Premium or Signature support. As of 12/1/21, it is now available to Standard support. This is, needless to say, a big deal.

Generate Next Best Action Recommendations Using Flow

You can now use Flow Builder to craft recommendation strategy flows that generate actionable recommendations that work with the specialized Next Best Action lightning component on Lightning Pages and the Suggested Actions in Community Pages. Previously, doing this required the use of a separate builder

Create recommendation strategies from the New Flow window:

Automatically Migrate your Workflow Rules to Flows

A New Element Joins the Fray – Collection Filter!

A new way to filter and find records in a collection joins the growing number of out of the box collection processors. Instead of looping to find a set of records within a collection, you’ll now be able to specify record criteria or create a formula to filter down an existing collection into a smaller one. This opens up a world of possibilities as it will allow you to handle greater amounts of records without hitting the ‘Iteration Limit Exceeded’ error that plagues transactions with bigger loops. Need to filter down a collection of 500 contacts? Collection Filter can do that for you!

Check out the separate post about Filter here on USF!

Sneak Preview: The New ‘Collection Filter’ Element

View All of an Object’s Record-Triggered Flows with Flow Explorer…

Flow explorer shows an ordered list of all the flows affected by a specific triggering event.

You will also get a nice side panel that allows you to open the flow directly and view all of the versions associated with the Flow. Notice how you’ll also be able to activate previous versions in the same place.

…AND Control the Order of Your Triggered Flows

You can apply numeric values to order your triggered flows.

  • Flows with the same trigger (before- or after-save) on the same object with trigger order values from 1 to 1,000 run in ascending
    order (1, 2, 3, and so on). Multiple flows with the same trigger order value run in alphabetical order based on the flows’ API nam
  • Flows without trigger order values run next and in the order of their created dates. Flows in Winter ’22 and before run and continue
    to run in this order, unless you define a trigger order value for them.
  • Flows with trigger order values from 1,001 to 2,000 run next and in ascending order. Any ties are settled using the flows’ API names.

(Note that the team does expect, in a future release, to marry this ordering process to the Flow Explorer shown above for a drag and drop reordering capability.)

Dynamic Forms for Flow (Beta) Supports Additional Field Types

You can now additionally add Email, Phone, and Picklist fields by simply dragging the fields onto the screen:

This features remains in Beta. Keep in mind that if you want to create an easy form to enable the creation of a new record using this feature, create a new record variable to contain it and select it in the ‘Record Variable’ field in the upper right. (later the team plans to make that step automatic and unnecessary)

Auto-Layout Improvements

Autolayout Mode has gone GA and filled in a couple of coverage gaps:

Perhaps the best new Auto-Layout feature is…

Open Subflows Directly from the Canvas in Auto-layout

An often requested quality of life feature, you can now open subflows directly from the canvas and when creating a Subflow! In the future (safe harbor) we plan to add the Subflow description to the canvas as well.

Shortcuts provide faster access to preconfigured elements

In Record-Triggered Flows in Autolayout Mode, shortcuts will appear to facilitate email sending and record updating:

Accessibility Enhancements

1) Flow Achieves Full WCAG 2.0 Accessibility Support

2) Create and Edit Flows with Your Keyboard

3) Screen Flows launched via a URL-based method now meet the contrast requirements of
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA

Flow’s accessibility services have been improved. Keyboard traversal is fully supported in Screen Builder as wells as the Flow runtime. You can navigate between sections of Flow Builder, and screen readers work across the full product.

Custom Footer Labels are Translatable

The Custom Footer Labels that became available last release are now fully translatable.

Choices Enhancements: Use a Record Collection to Generate Your Choices

If you have a collection of records or strings from earlier in your flow, you can now use that to generate a set of radio buttons, checkboxes, or picklist items.

Supercool Pilot Updates – Reactive Screens

See this post for an example of how reactive screens allow powerful dynamic effects on Flow screens. If you want to join the pilot, go here.

New Ordering Changes take effect for flows configured to run on the latest API version (54.0)

After-Save Record-Triggered Flows Now Run Before Entitlements are Executed

Entitlements can now include any updates made by traditional after-save flows.

Approval and Time-Based Workflow Field Updates Now Execute Before-Save and After-Save Record-Triggered Flows

This change allows field changes made by approval processes to trigger flows.

Keep in mind that this will not affect any existing flows unless you choose to click Save As and ‘upgrade’ the flow to use version 54 or higher.

Enhanced Einstein Discovery Flow Action supports Multiclass Models

Multiclass models predict the most likely outcome among up to ten possible outcomes. For example, if you offer seven insurance products, use a multiclass model
to predict which insurance product a new customer will likely purchase. When you run the flow, the output of this action is the predicted
value (the predicted winning insurance product, for example), along with a bar chart of ranked probabilities by value (all insurance
products). Optionally, you can include top predictors.

Order Management: New Flow Actions, and Rollback

The Order Management flows are updated to use the Roll Back Records element, which cancels pending record changes when a flow
exits due to an error. In addition, the following new actions are available:

Find Routes With Fewest Splits Using OCI
Find inventory availability using Omnichannel Inventory and identify the fulfillment routes with fewest splits for an order summary.
This action combines the existing Omnichannel Inventory Service Get Availability and Find Routes With Fewest Splits actions.


Add Order Item Summary
Add order item summaries to an order summary

In addition, you’ll enjoy improved order throughput with the flows in the DOM Routing Flow package. We’ve updated them to use multithreaded processing
with scheduled paths.

Additionally, an Even Exchange standard flow is now available.

Easily Keep Track of your Flows in your Browser Tabs

The flow’s name and version now appear on your browser tab titles, so you can quickly
scan your workspace and find your flow.

More Places Where You Can Use a Flow to Override Standard Behavior

More Salesforce product teams are implementing functionality using standard flows and allowing users to override the functionality with custom flows.

Health Cloud: Adding Patient Medication

Event Monitoring enables flows to be created that respond to Security Events

ApiAnomalyEvent, CredentialStuffingEvent, ReportAnomalyEvent, and SessionHijackingEvent are exposed as selectable platform events in Platform-Event triggered flow start elements.

Salesforce Surveys now ships Sentiment Analysis flows out-of-the-box

To process text responses in bulk, use a flow:
• Perform Survey Sentiment Analysis for User-Selected Question: Screen flow. Lets you define custom values, such as survey, questions,
type of operation to perform on the responses, and date range to process responses in the selected timeline.
• Perform Survey Sentiment Analysis: Autolaunched flow. Lets you schedule bulk processing of responses.
Use the invocable action in the flow to define the operation to perform on the responses and the date range.