Salesforce Development – Sunshine and Other Unhandled Exceptions

Year End Tax Receipt for Donors

Easy peasy list of all last year’s donations

Send your donors 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.

UPDATE 1/12: Now available on AppExchange!

CORRECTION 1/10: It does NOT work with Microsoft Word/Excel Mail Merge! I’m looking into how to make it happen using Data Loader and will report back!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.