e-mail – Sunshine and Other Unhandled Exceptions

Get Salesforce Practice by Tracking Your Habits

Want more practice learning Salesforce? Don’t have experience beyond Trailhead? Build an app to help you track good or bad habits. This is a win-win-win: hone your app builder skills, improve your habits, and you’ll have a cool app to show off in job interviews.

Salesforce Skills Used

Create a custom object and fields
Create reports
Create dashboard components
Make it mobile friendly
Problem solving: how to turn real life issues into measurable data
Send email every 3 days with stats
Bonus: Screen flow for easy tracking

My version: Migraine Tracking App

Forget record-triggered flows or apex triggers. The real demons are migraine triggers. I want to build an app to track when I have one of my trigger foods and when I have symptoms.

I have a threshold for tolerance of delicious triggers. I can eat some chocolate, dairy or red wine without reaching the threshold and getting sick, but I don’t know what the threshold is. Can building my own tracking app help?

Year End Tax Receipt for Donors

UPDATE 1/13/23: If you’re installing today from AppExchange, it’s a new version 1.4 that you can run by running a flow called Year End Tax Flow. New detailed instructions below. To install the new version, please uninstall the old version first! Go to Setup, search for “Installed Packages,” find “Year End Tax” and uninstall that.

Easy peasy list of all last year’s donations

Send your donors (contact records only) a tax receipt at the beginning of the new year listing all of last year’s donations. For Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack users, this unmanaged package will generate a table for each donor listing the gifts they made last year. Use your own email to send a tax receipt by email. The table lists the amount, date and, optionally, the campaign name of each donation.

Thanks for the great app, just in time…Simple, easy, elegant, and just what we needed.
David, Eaglesrest.org

Send Tables in Email in Flow – NPSP Example #2 Memorial Gifts

This is the second in a series on sending email with an embedded table of records of NPSP objects. The first post was a list of payments.

“Here is the use case: sending a family of a deceased relative one letter with all the names of people who have donated in memoriam. So, one letter to the family for many people who gave. Client is a large hospice so this is happening weekly. Open to different options — apps? exports & merge? other? Thanks!”
Rob aske d in the Power of Us Hub, back in April

Well, I’m a few months late, but here you go, Rob. I made a Flow that sends out an email like the one below. I see now that you said “letter”…oops. Hopefully you figured out a solution by now, anyway!

Install this unmanaged package to try it out.

Unsubscribe Link 3.10

Update: July 30, 2021 Now on the AppExchange!

Flow improved so much in 2020 (yes! a good thing actually happened in this Great-Pacific-Garbage-Patch of a year) that I was able to take out much of the complication of setting up this app.

And thanks to RAD Women Code courses 1 & 2, I was able to add a Visualforce controller and Apex Tests! I am so grateful to my incredible coaches and cohorts.

What matters for you is that it is much easier to install. It’s still not easy to install but hey, it’s 2021. You can handle what life throws at you.

Installation instructions here.

Requires Summer ‘21 and Salesforce Edition: Enterprise, Unlimited, Developer, Performance.

Send Emails with Tables in Flow – NPSP Example with Payments

This post is building on the work of the super-smarty Narender Singh aka ForcePanda aka @Nads_P07. With Spring ’21 rich text emails, you can now send tables with lists of child objects.

I followed his tutorial and built two flows specifically using Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) objects. The first one is a list of payments and the second is a list of completed volunteer activities. I’ll blog about the second one later. Also on the to-do list is to make one that lists all the gifts received in memory or in tribute to someone else.

Invite Contact to Next, Earliest, Upcoming Campaign Event

Let’s say your organization has 4 (virtual) workshops a year. When a new Contact is created from your website, you want to invite them via email to the NEXT workshop.

We’ll use a record trigger flow and two flow elements to do that. No loop!

Let’s get even fancier: we’ll use Scheduled Paths (#spring21) to send the email three days after the contact is created. Let’s use a formula to make sure the event starts more than six days from now – to give them three days notice before the event.

Said another way:

Day 1 Monday – Contact Created.
- Record-triggered flow looks for the next upcoming workshop that is happening LATER than Day 7 and prepares to send an email.
Day 4 Thursday – Email sent inviting person to next workshop.
Day 7 Sunday – He rested.
Day 29 – Our next workshop!

Send Email From Anyone* in Flow

In my Unsubscribe Link app, (yes, that again) the Flow sends out an email from the user running the Flow, which in that case is a Site Guest User. And the email comes from “[Insert Company Name] Site Guest User” which is weird and confusing. I’ve finally googled to learn the secrets of some fields in the Flow “Send Email” Action. And it’s pretty basic and very much a “why didn’t I google this before” moment.

In Flow’s “Send Email” Action, plug in an organization wide email addresses into “Sender Address” and type “OrgWideEmailAddress” in as Sender Type and bob’s your uncle. Want more of an explanation? Keep reading!

This is an image of the gentleman to which the phrase "Bob's Your Uncle" is supposed to refer. He's a bald, bearded gent in the late 1800s.

Your Flow Finished

In this scenario, I launch a Flow from a Visualforce page and finish the flow on a different Visualforce page instead of the standard “Your Flow Finished” page.

In earlier versions of my Unsubscribe Link app, the “Finish” button would take you a screen that said “YOUR FLOW FINISHED” which many of you pointed out, is less than ideal.

Screen one:

Screen two (old version):

And click “Finish” to get this beauty:

Unsubscribe Link

JULY 30, 2021 UPDATE: This version is now outdated! Please go here for the latest.

Unsubscribe Link 2.2 (OUTDATED)

Allow Recipients to Unsubscribe From All Email Sent via Salesforce

When the recipient clicks to unsubscribe, a flow will look for all contacts and leads who have this email in the Email field and mark them “Email Opt Out.” The email address owner will receive one confirmation email immediately. A custom object tracks when someone unsubscribes to allow you to report on it.

Image of five star review from AppExchange. Title of review: Great solution - easily modified for other objects. Body of review: Was looking for a solution to add an unsubscribe link to survey invitations. Implementation of this solution was super easy thanks to the extensive documentation. Very easy to manipulate to work for any object with a contact lookup!

See How It Works

UPDATE: 1/28/21 I realized how to send the confirmation email from someone other than “Site Guest User.” More in this post.

Test the Newest Unsubscribe Link App, Please?

This is the third iteration of my app to allow all users to opt out of email sent through Salesforce.

Last week I posted an add-on to the existing app to improve it. Here I have a totally new version with all the bells and whistles.

Could you please install it and test it for me? It should take about 10-15 minutes. After collecting enough feedback, I’ll submit this version to the AppExchange for security review.