Process Builder has an ‘Immediate Action’ for executing
flows and the challenge was to understand how that worked and how it passed
variables to the flow. Once I figured that out, it was pretty straight forward. The
general flow is shown below and the steps to create it follow. We needed to automatically
populate the Account team on a record using information from the Account record
and a Custom Object every time a record is created or edited.
General Steps:
1) Open Flow tool.
2) Create a record look up with the required Variables from Standard
Object. These are the variables that you need for your final record and
anything that you need for subsequent look ups, if applicable.
3) Create a record look up with required variables from the
Custom Object. These will pull the variables from the first lookup you created
and create, look them up in the Custom Object, and create the fields for the final record.
4) Create the record with the variables from the prior two
steps.
5) Save Flow and activate. Activation is critical since the
flow won’t show up in Process Builder if it is not active.
6) Open Process Builder.
7) Create a process that passes the data to the variables in
the Flow (assigned to the variable names you created).
8) Save and activate the Process.
Note that everytime you edit the flow you have to create a new process to call it. This can be annoying when you first start to learn. Making a flow chart with the variable names can speed up this process. I expect not that I know how to create flows, there will be less versions of both the flow and the process. Also, it helps to add a note in the description of each iteration related to what change was made and what did not work in the prior iteration.
