INTRODUCTION TO SALESFORCE FLOW

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Have you heard about Flows? If you are in the field of salesforce, you know this section of salesforce very well. Flows is the gem in the administrator and developer’s tool belt. If you are a beginner and don’t know about flows or how to use flows in salesforce. So, Today we are going through every aspect of flows and see: 

  • Power of Automation

  • What is Flow?

  • Building Blocks of a Flow Builder

  • Types of Flows

  • Flow Builder Tour

  • Conclusion



Power of Automation

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Automation tools are very important because they make your work easy. The benefits are you can make your process once and trust that the process is always done just so and saves your users time. Automation tools are declarative, no-code tools that make it more powerful by automating the number of administrative tasks that sales representatives and their managers have to perform manually.


According to your criteria, set up your flow action like if the salesforce opportunity is closed as won, the relevant sales order is automatically created in the system. You can also set up as many criteria as you want in a single flow.


There are many automation tools to automate your business process in salesforce:

  1. Flows

  2. Process Builder

  3. Workflow

  4. Approvals


What is Flow?

Flows is an automation tool used for collecting, processing, and updating information depending on business processes. Flows are a no-code tool but require that you understand some basic programming concepts like variables and how logic works. 


It’s better to use declarative, no-code tools and work your way up to code solutions. Since our use case requires conditional logic and actions, the simplest solution that fits our requirement is a flow.


Building Blocks of a Flow Builder

There are three main building blocks:

Elements: It is used to perform logical actions like assignments, decisions, or loops that the flow can execute. 


Connectors: It will tell the flow which element to execute next. It connects the elements and defines the path that the flow takes at run time.


Resources: It is nothing but a variable containing a value that is to be used in a flow. The Manager tab displays the resources that are available in the flow. You can also create as many resources as you want.


Types Of Flows

There are different flow types in Flow Builder. When you create a new flow, you’re prompted to select the type of Flow you wish to create.



Screen Flow requires user interaction and it is called through a button or action or displayed in a Lightning Page. This cannot be automatically triggered.


Scheduled-Triggered Flow doesn’t require user interaction. It runs automatically at a specified time and frequency.


Autolaunched Flows with No Trigger are called through Apex, Process Builder, or another Flow. It doesn’t require user interaction and runs automatically behind the scenes.


Record-Triggered Flow runs only when a record is created or updated, similar to Process Builder. Assignment, Decision, Loop and Get records elements are supported by this flow.


Platform Event-Triggered Flow runs when a platform event message is received similar to auto-launched flow. Unlike Process Builder, users can access all available records when a flow is invoked by a platform event message.


Flow Builder Tour


The toolbox contains Elements and resources which we will use to build our flow. 


Elements tab - Interaction, Logic, and Data Elements

From Here, You can create new elements and resources in the flow. 


Interaction Elements include Action and Subflow. You might find Screen Element inside this in Screen Flow.


Logic Section includes Assignment used to assign a record to a variable, Decision which is like if-else in Apex,  Pause work when pause condition is met pause the flow interview, Loop is used to iterate over multiple records, Collection Sort gives us the ability to sort a collection variable in ascending or descending order.


Data Elements include Create, Update, Get, and Delete Records.


Manager Tab

It contains the existing elements and resources of the flow. You can also create resources like Variable, Constant, Formulae, Collection, and Choices.


Conclusion

I think many of the companies work using the same idea if they are in the same business. But there is always another way to do things that may be better from the current idea and accelerate business further. Flows can do just that in our field. In shorts, they have made the jobs of Salesforce Administrators easier. In coming Blogs, I will share many business case and the solution of related Business Case using Flow Builder.

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