Salesforce Administration – Sunshine and Other Unhandled Exceptions

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.

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 3.10

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.

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.

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.

Pass Record Id to Flow in Quick Action

Are you reading Samantha Shain’s blog The Data Are Alright yet? I LOVE how she talks through all the ups and downs of building her first flow – which is a really complicated one, by the way! She shares her thought processes, her research and her frustrations, pride and other feelings so openly. So if you see an increase in feelings shared here, you know who inspired me!

In Sam’s post, she mentions a few things that she had trouble figuring out. She uses a custom button or link with a URL to pass a record id to a Flow. As she guessed, there is a more elegant way to do it. So elegant even Lady Whistledown would approve.

Netflix marketing image of the TV show Bridgerton. A bunch of fancy people looking fancy. — _{Look to Miss Daphe Bridgerton, this year’s prize debutante, for the most tawdry yet elegant flow solutions in the ton.}

CORRECTION: Sam tweeted “I got it from a Quick Action eventually on my own (I wish I had this resource then), but what I really needed was to pass in a *group* of ids from a list view… which afaik is not possible without code.”

Your Flow Finished

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

JUNE 7, 2021 UPDATE: Get Unsubscribe Link 3.10 and instructions here. This version has not yet gone through Salesforce Labs Security Review and is not yet on the AppExchange. To switch from 2.2 to 3.10, follow the instructions below on how to uninstall the package. ONLY WORKS IN SUMMER ’21 ORGS!! If 2.2 is working just fine for you, there is no need to change to 3.10.

Unsubscribe Link 2.2 (on AppExchange)

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.

The Wonderful World of Conga Composer Parameters

As the insanity that would be the year 2020 begins to wind down, now is a great time to reflect on all that you’ve learned this year and the work you’re especially proud of. I’ve gotten the opportunity to work on a lot of functionality and development of features this year, but for me the project that stands out the most is the configuration of a doc gen solution that involved Conga Composer and Conga Trigger. I had some previous experience with Conga Composer, but through this project, I learned more specifically about how robust Conga parameters are. Quick breakdown of how this solution works: the parameters are used to control the behavior of your doc gen solution (i.e., when and in what format your document generates and/or sends out via email) and can be built into a custom button that, when clicked, triggers generation with the parameters you’ve put in place. You can also go one step further with the use of Conga Trigger, which involves converting the custom button into a formula field, then integrating that field into a Workflow Rule and Action.