Salesforce Development – Sunshine and Other Unhandled Exceptions

Use Summer ’21 Flow Collection Sort to Label Top Ten Donors

Broad use case: Use the new Collection Sort feature in Flow to find a specific number of records that meet your criteria, and sort them with one or more criteria (criterion?)

Example use cases: I want my top 3 open opps to have a giant dollar sign image on them or I want to automatically nudge/shame the five users who logged in least last month or I want to focus a campaign on my most active volunteers in the summer.

Our specific case: I want to look at a contact record in Nonprofit Success Pack and see immediately that they are one of my top ten donors.

Install this unmanaged package to try it out.

Unsubscribe Link 3.4

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.

What is the Unsubscribe Link App?

Send an email to anyone from inside Salesforce and include an unsubscribe link right in the email! This app will find all contacts and leads with that email address and mark them “Email opt out.” It will also create an Unsubscribe__c object so you can track unsubscribes over time.

This version has not gone through Salesforce security review and is not on the AppExchange. To install the older version that meets those requirements, go here.

To Uninstall the Older Version

If you have any Unsubscribe__c records from using this package, you’ll lose them by uninstalling.

Deactivate the Flows: Unsubscribe Link, UnsubscribeContactsv1, UnsubscribeLeadsv1.
Open the record for your Site.
- Change the “Active Site Homepage” to any other Visualforce page in your system.
- Deactivate the site. Sorry but you are unable to delete Force.com Sites. (When you install the new package, you can reuse your existing site).
From Setup, search for “Installed Packages” and uninstall.

Fixes I’m Proud Of

I moved as much of the configuration to Custom Metadata Types as possible. Flows and Visualforce pages look at the CMDT for values so the user only has to put in correct values in one place.

The error emails should be much more helpful now.

Did I mention I included Apex Tests and a Visualforce page with a controller?!

I fixed the confusion of fields called Unsubscribe_Link__c on both the Contact and Lead so that’s no longer a manual step.

More details about updates available in the instructions.

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 Flow’s 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.

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.

Upgrade Unsubscribe Link

I built this really great app to allow email recipients to unsubscribe from all emails sent through Salesforce, but it hasn’t been exactly easy to set up or use. Introducing the first upgrade which makes it much more user friendly!

With the upgrade, your Salesforce users can now pull a merge field into their Lightning and Classic email templates to include the Unsubscribe Link. Bam. No more having to modify and clone confusing email templates.

See how easy it is to add the Unsubscribe Link to a List Email? Your users will love this.

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.

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:

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

Continue reading Simple Before-Save Flow

Flow Building Live 3/12 10AM PDT

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

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.

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!)

Continue reading Update N Records in Flow Without a Loop

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 Update 1000s of Records in Flow with Spring ’20