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.

RIP Bailey Bones, my beloved companion of 14 years.

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.

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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 andor custom conditions. We need those kinds of logic options when looking up records.

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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.

Published by

JessieRymph

Jessie joined Salesforce.org in 2018 to give introductory webinars to nonprofit customers. She now is a Senior Solution Developer supporting nonprofits and education customers at Salesforce. All opinions expressed on this blog are her own or those of the contributors. She's spent 17 years more or less in CRMs and databases, but didn't meet Salesforce until 2011. Jessie co-led the Seattle Salesforce Nonprofit User Group in 2015-2016. She wrote a sh*tty first draft of a novel and hopes to turn it into a screenplay!

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