Category / Salesforce Development

by JessieRymph

Learn Flow Loops Video

Join me for a Salesforce.org webinar Intro to Flow on Thursday, Apr 9, 2020 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PDT. Register here.

Remember back when there were community events and conferences? I had the honor to speak at Cactusforce in Phoenix in January — highly recommend this small event! So many MVPs, so many recognizable experts in one small event. And the weather was great.

Session Description: Flow Loops unlock incredible power previously held only by devs. Without using any code, Admins can create an automated process to loop through all related records and take actions based on what is found there!

Towards the end of the video I talk about Spring ’20 amazingness with Flow that you can read more about here and here.

Go Ahead: Loop Through that Collection in Flow – Jessie Rymph from Marisa Hambleton on Vimeo.

 

by JessieRymph

Simple Before-Save Flow

Here’s a real quick intro to the Spring ’20 Before-Save Flow feature. Find in depth information on this topic from Jennifer Lee and Jodie Miners.

Basic gist: 

  1. Double click into the Start element and indicate to launch Flow on new record created (in this example).
  2. Use a Decision element to see if this record meets criteria.
  3. If so, use an Assignment element to update the field values. There is no “update records” – you just use an Assignment.
  4. Access the values of the Record by using $Record.Field__c when choosing a resource or variable.
  5. You cannot access $Record.Id because it doesn’t have an ID yet! It hasn’t been saved.

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by JessieRymph

Flow Building Live 3/12 10AM PDT

Join me and Dev Evangelist Kevin Poorman for Code Live with Salesforce Developers!codelive

There’s no registration. Just tune in https://trailhead.salesforce.com/live/ on March 12 at 10 PDT.

No, I haven’t suddenly learned to write code (but I’m working on it!) I’ll be building a Flow and Kevin will be writing the equivalent code. We plan to build a solution for nonprofit customers and will let you know when we have more details.

Notice I said “PDT”? That’s Pacific Daylight Time because we’ll be springing forward this weekend in much of the states. This is the one where we lose an hour, unfortunately.

by JessieRymph

Update N Records in Flow Without a Loop

Thanks Alex Edelstein and Narender Singh for building exciting Invokable Apex Actions that extend the use of Flow for admins!

USE CASE: The Ugly Dog Adoption Agency wants to find the 30 dogs who have been at the shelter the longest (minimum 60 days). A Flow will change the picklist “Old Timer” to “Yes” and the staff will then run a promotion for these special doggies. (Don’t worry, Jo Jo Pumpkins! You’ll be on the local news!)jo jo pumpkins

dogflowN Continue reading →

by JessieRymph

Update 1000s of Records in Flow with Spring ’20

Dude. With the Spring ’20 release, we can now update 1000s of records at a time in Flow. The release itself doesn’t give us this power directly, but it allows developers to create invocable apex actions that can be reused for many objects.

Thanks to Alex Edelstein and UnofficalSF.com for an unmanaged package that performs this magic for us! Watch my video of how I use the “Map Collection” apex action to update the Activity Type of 5,000 records! Continue reading →

by JessieRymph

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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by JessieRymph

Was it worth my time to automate that? On the AppExchange!

Thanks to everyone who expressed an interest in my June 5, 2019 post “Was it worth my time to automate that?” The solution is now available on the AppExchange from Salesforce Labs! Check it out!

Have you ever wondered:

  • How much time am I saving with this automation?
  • How many times has this process ever fired?
  • Was the time I spent building this thing worth the investment?
  • Are the people who requested this automation actually using it? If not, who is?

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by Lashonna McBride

My First Time at Forcelandia: A New Admin’s Account

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend my very first Forcelandia. This was the fifth year for the event, and it was also the first year it was sold out. I must admit, I was pretty pumped. Not only was this the first Salesforce-related conference I was attending, but I was excited to get a glimpse at the developer side of the Salesforce landscape. I may have played ACDC’s “Thunderstruck” a few times on the way down, you know, just to get in the mood.

Forcelandia is a conference that may appear intimidating at first glance to the new Salesforce admin, as it is mostly tailored to the developer. Having attended though, I can say I got tremendous value out of the experience as a newbie. Below are some of my takeaways:

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by JessieRymph

Intro to Flow at Forcelandia

At Forcelandia this year, I explained why we have to “get records” and why we use record variables with this analogy of ordering at a coffee shop with a robot.

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by Maya Peterson

One Process To Rule Them All

This year I had the honor of presenting at Forcelandia again. Forcelandia is one of my favorite user led conferences, both because of it’s wealth of technical content and because, living in Seattle, it’s our closest PNW Conference. Big Shout out to Slalom for being a Platinum Sponsor this year! And of course to all the amazing folks that managed to put this great event together.

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