Summer ’19 Flow Sneak Preview

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Here’s a sneak peak at some of the things you’ll be able to start playing with in a couple of weeks (either via a new pre-release org or an early sandbox upgrade).

Keep in mind our forward-looking statement. Please make your purchase decisions based only on generally available product functionality.

The Flow Builder gets Undo, Redo, and Duplicate. As well it should.

You can find elements quickly. (We’d be very proud of this one if Cloud Flow Designer didn’t already have it.)

Rich Text is back. in black. and red. and bold. (Boy, we’re funny)

We added an image button that uploads and inserts images too.

There are a couple of limitations to be aware of:

  • The added images get created into the org as ContentVersion metadata, but can’t really be packaged with the flow because ContentVersion use id’s that are specific to an org. It will take more work to figure out a solution for that.
  • At the last minute we had to disable rich text in Text Templates because we need to do some more work to make sure the rich text you create doesn’t spew html into downstream plain text fields like the email body in the Send Email flow action. We’ll have that working next release.

The “New Flow” button now generates a New Flow dialog box that provides access to flow templates.

Watch for special flow template announcements at TrailheaDX in May.

The new Automation Home page

We have big plans for the metrics and tools we intend to make available from this new page.

Flow Support for Rich Web Objects (JSON)

Our most complex and powerful feature in Summer ’19 allows incoming JSON to be converted to rich objects that can be used declaratively in Flow.

Read the deep-dive post on rich web object support.

Actions have categories to make them easier to manage in large numbers.

We haven’t enabled custom actions to be tagged with categories yet, but that’s in the works.

Additional Enhancements

  • With the new $Flow.InterviewStartTime system variable, you can use the start time of the flow interview in Decision elements, formula resources, and elsewhere in the flow.
  • Dependent Picklist component can be set to Required.
  • Custom Metadata Type Records can be used in Process Builder
  • New Build Flows with Flow Builder trail at Trailhead.
  • Flow names and properties are now available via REST (This is useful for doing things like putting a picklist of flow names on a flow screen to let a user pick which flow to go to next). previously you had to use the metadata retrieve process)