From Tamar Erlich – Submit an orchestration from a button
Currently there are two ways you can launch a flow orchestration: using a record trigger, or auto launch from Apex, But what if I want to be able to launch an orchestration from a button and mimic the good old “Submit for Approval” button?
I looked at alternative ways to start orchestrations, and this is what I found:
1. Launching an orchestration from a URL button was not user friendly as the user was presented with a blank auto launched flow screen and was not redirected back to the record when finished even if the the return URL was part of the button definition. Overall, while this may work, the user experience was not smooth
2. Trying to include the submit flow as an interactive step assigned to the current user, resulted in a warning when saving the flow and an error during execution saying that no assigned user was found
I ended up with the following solution that worked well and gave a smooth user experience:
1. An action button to launch the submit flow on the record page
2. A submit screen flow that will update a field on the record to indicate the record was submitted and who the approver is
3. An orchestration that will listen to the field updated by the submit flow and will run the approval flow, routing to the approver that was updated on the record by the submit flow
4. The approval flow will update the record again with the final approval status
Here is an illustration of the overall process:

Both the submit and approve flows are very simple and only have one screen followed by an update records step

Launch the submit flow from an action button added to the page layout


The flow orchestration only has one stage and one step

It starts when the record’s approval status is updated to submitted

And routes the approval to the username that was updated on the record by the submit flow

Here is a short video demonstrating the complete process
Some notes about the flows:
1. The submit flow clears any previous approval status and rejection notes
2. The approval flow only displays rejection notes if the user selects to reject, using a visibility rule
3. In both flows, I’m using a record input variable and this saves having a get records element in the flow as the whole record gets passed in from the button or from the orchestration step
Possible enhancements:
1. The approval request flow can include a message with approval details to the approval request flow by using a display text with merge fields from the record and related records information
2. The submit flow can select the approver automatically by using criteria from the record or an approval matrix stored in custom metadata
3. The submit flow can also be used to recall or not allow to submit an approval by displaying another screen based on the approval status
Launching an orchestration from a button opens up a lot of possibilities, please share if you come up with other use cases.