An Admin’s Strength FLOWS from the Salesforce

I created my first flow this week (starting from scratch). The details are proprietary, so no screen shots. I can discuss the general operation of the flow. Before I go into detail, I learned how to create the flow by watching a bunch of online tutorials. The one thing they all had in common was starting the flow with a Screen Element. The flow I wanted to create started from Process Builder, without direct user interaction (no Screen Element). This complicated the learning process.

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.