Winter ’20 Flow Improvements & Disappointments

Oh man…so much good stuff in the new release. And a real bummer.

Add a lookup component in Flow

I’m really disappointed about this. I was confusing “lookup” with “search.” I want to search for any record I want and get a list returned. Nope. I can search using any lookup field I already have. This is good, but not quite what I was thinking.

Unsatisfying use case : A dog turned in at the animal shelter has a microchip number (text field) which I want to use to search for potentially matching dogs. I want to look up a dog in my flow then process their intake at the shelter.

• Possible solution: I could do this if I had the microchip number in the name of animal, like Bailey 238392, and I looked it up to the animal record from say, an adoption record. It has to already be a lookup field.

Satisfying use case: Let’s say I am processing an animal record for adoption. From the animal’s record, I can lookup the Contact record of the person who is adopting the animal as part of my animal adoption flow.

Note: you can do a work around for this kind of search. Thanks Jenwlee.

Conditional visibility

Hurray! Instead of using a decision to determine which screen I show second in my flow, I can use only one screen and conditionally decide which questions to include! For cats, I display “Cat Questions” and a checkbox for “Evil Cat?” All animals have the favorite activities options.

One of the coolest parts about this is that the logic options are and, or & custom conditions. We need those kinds of logic options when looking up records.

Delightful & Overdue Improvements

• You can activate the flow with one click! You don’t have to hit “Back” and
  “Activate” and drive yourself crazy.
• When I’m in an element and I create a new resource, it now auto-populates that resource for me. I don’t have to remember to go back in and look up that variable that I just made! 
• Start a flow on a schedule! Yes! Vague but real use case: I used to have Demand Tools (sigh…) run once a day to look for updates to activity records. I had to rig this using some Windows tool on my PC and it was complicated. But now I could just run a scheduled Flow to do whatever it was doing…I forget 🙂

Learn More

Flow Queen Jenwlee (I bow before you) has more updates.

Flow section of the release notes.

Save the date! Salesforce.org Winter Release webinar on November 5 11a.m. PT. where I’ll demo this stuff and more.