Salesforce Administration – Page 2 – 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?

Understand Tricky Flow Concepts

Head on over to the Salesforce Admins blog to watch 5 new videos that I helped create that explain some tricky flow concepts with fun metaphors and images!

“Get Records” is like a big claw that grabs records from your database and
pulls them into Flow as variables!

Are you wondering…

What are the most common types of flow?
Why do I need to store information in variables?
What is a record variable?
Why on earth do I need to “Get Records?” Shouldn’t the records already be there?
What does it mean for a variable to store multiple records?
What are loops?
What are Create Records, Update Records, and Delete Records?

Then these 5 new videos can help!

So you still want to Salesforce volunteer at a nonprofit?

Here’s what you need to know.

By Gordon Lee

Before the proverbial ink dried on the first article on why you shouldn’t Salesforce volunteer at a nonprofit, I could already sense the exceptions the community would raise that I didn’t have the time to address. The Salesforce Trailblazer Community, after all, is made up of passionate tech nerds who have a keen eye in finding exceptions to things. It’s in our nature since we have to sniff out those nuances to be great at what we do.

Folks sent in anecdotes, counter-points, and personal stories about how their experiences were mutually beneficial and what I put out there was a disservice to the nonprofit world. My opinion is that those experiences are the exception, and don’t reflect the greater trend of nonprofits that are harmed when a volunteer is only using them to get experience.

Nevertheless, there is merit in the exceptions raised. So, this follow-up aims to address those exceptions, and clarify when it is a good idea to Salesforce volunteer at a nonprofit.

Flow: Display Photo or Upload Photo

The flow will display either a photo or remind you to upload one. On any object!

How It Works:

The Flow looks for a file attached to that record with the title “SalesforcePhoto” (or another phrase of your choosing).

The File gets the title from the name of the file when you upload it. If you upload SalesforcePhoto.jpg, the title becomes “SalesforcePhoto.” You could also open the File details in Salesforce and change the title.

If that file is found, it’s previewed thanks to the work of Narender Singh, (of course)!

If not found, it asks you to upload a file from your computer named SalesforcePhoto and attaches it to that record. From then on the, the flow displays the photo!

We are using the app because constituents and donors are more than just a record, and seeing their faces humanizes the data.
Donna, Vote Solar

Live Flow Training Thursday!

Learn Flow with me tomorrow, Thursday October 7! Join me for a live, hands-on training session tomorrow at 3pm ET/ 12pm PT.

Click here to register.

I just finished the first time running this and folks loved it.

Ralph says "Nice work, presenters. Special props to Jessie, great energy!

Denise says "This session answered questions I had with a coworker this morning. Thank you!"

5 Steps of Flow Loops

Repeat these steps whenever you need to look through a bunch of records

In less then 12 minutes, you’ll learn the five steps and be able to update the records in your collection.

Thanks to 100 Days of Trailhead for hosting this video on their YouTube channel and nudging me to make a follow up which will debut soon.

Invocable Methods: How to Send Data Between Flow and Apex

Invocable methods used with Flow allow you to launch something in an admin friendly format that uses the massive power of Apex. For example, you have an intake screen that collects answers to a few questions, then you use Apex to loop through many related records dispersing those answers in places hard to reach from Flow.

Creating an invocable method in a nutshell: First you write an apex class with @invocable method (label and description) and whatever code you want the apex to do (easy, right?) Then make your Flow including your input and output variables. Then add an Apex action in Flow to send/receive those variables.

Here are some things I learned about sending data between Flow and Apex.

Invocable methods in Apex always receive a List and they return a List unless the return type is null. Read more under “Inputs and Outputs” here.

Sent	Sent From	Received by	Received
Record Variable.id	Flow	Apex	List<Id> listOfIds
Record Collection Variable	Flow	Apex	List<List<Opportunity>> nameOfThis
List containing 1 sObject record	Apex	Flow	Record (single) variable
List of Lists of sObject	Apex	Flow	Record Collection Variable

This is NOT an exhaustive list at all. I didn’t try sending a record variable (not just the ID from Flow), but I assume that will work. There are also generic sObjects that are pretty special, but I didn’t try.

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

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.