Updates to Dedupe Record Collections Action & ExtractStringsFromCollection Action

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Update 5/18/20

The ‘Dedupe Fields From Record Collection‘ action is being retired and the functionality is now being moved into the CollectionsProcessors ‘ExtractFieldsFromCollection’ action:

Ragan Walker added several improvements to the action:

  • Parameterizes dedupeValues functionality (defaults to true)
  • You can now output to a comma-separated text variable instead of just a text collection variable
  • Supports extracting + deduping of multi-select picklist fields
  • Adds flow documentation
  • Supports bulkification
  • Adds exception handling to make action more robust
  • Adds further unit testing

You can still download the ‘DedupeRecordsFromCollection’ action below.

Intro

A few months back I posted about an action Danny Tilton and I over at CapTech Consulting worked on that has simplified a ton of my Flows. You can find that on my LinkedIn profile here (sorry, shameless plug: Here)

Code files can be found here https://github.com/alexed1/LightningFlowComponents/tree/master/flow_action_components

New Version Highlights

  • We separated the action into two classes: DedupeFieldsFromRecordCollection and DedupeRecordCollection to simplify its usage.
  • Added a couple error exceptions – just in case!
  • You can now output results from DedupeFieldsFromRecordCollection to a comma-separated text variable (instead of just a collection)!

Dedupe Fields From Record Collection

NOTE: THIS ACTION IS NOW RETIRED IN FAVOR OF REVAMPING THE ‘ExtractStringFromCollection’ action. See the update at the beginning of this post.

Summary

This class takes in a Record Collection and spits out all of the de-duped values of a field of your choosing across the records in the collection.

I used this in my LinkedIn Post, but say you wanted to get a list of all of the Owners of a bunch of records, but you didnt want a bunch of duplicate IDs. Run this bad boy on your collection and you’ll get a collection or text string of unique IDs! You can that loop on that to send an email alert, for example.

Inputs

  • Object Type
  • InputRecordCollection – The collection you want to get the de-duped field from
  • fieldToDedupeOn – The API Name of the unique field values you want to return in your text collection

Outputs

Dedupe Record Collection

Installation Link: https://login.salesforce.com/packaging/installPackage.apexp?p0=04t4T000000x9LA

Sandbox Link (recommended): https://test.salesforce.com/packaging/installPackage.apexp?p0=04t4T000000x9LA

Summary

This is quite similar to the other class – instead of the action returning text, it just returns a set of de-duped records based on the field you specify.

In the example above you could de-dupe a set of Accounts based on OwnerId, then loop over each of the Accounts to grab its Owner to email on a nightly schedule. I think where this would come in handy is if you needed to grab other details about the record you’re de-duping on. Let’s say in your email to the Record Owner you wanted to give a few details about the record – that’s where you’d want this action.

Inputs

  • Object Type
  • inputRecordCollection – The collection you want to de-dupe
  • fieldToDedupeOn – The API Name of the unique field values you want to de-dupe all of the records on

Outputs

  • Object Type
  • outputRecordCollection