Salesforce Flow: Everything you need to know about Process Automation with Flow
In the Winter’22 release Readiness live sessions, speculations were rife that the Process Builder and Workflows rule is about to retire. However, Salesforce later revealed that these features are not going anywhere anytime soon, but there will be no enhancements to them. Instead, they will be focussing on Flow for all future automation investments.
In other words, in the Winter’22 release, Salesforce has emphasized that the Flow will be the preferred one-in-all solution for all your automation needs.
Hence, if you are considering early adoption of Salesforce Flow for your business, here is a brief overview of Salesforce Flow for you to reckon.
What is Salesforce Flow?
Flow or Lightning Flow is an application that automates your complicated business processes. In simple words, it’s an automation tool that can do various tasks such as posting chatters, sending emails, sending custom notifications, and many more. At the very core of Flow, lies the point-and-click Flow Builder.
“Flow Builder is a powerful user interface that makes building complex flows easy and simplified. You can build enterprise-level automation with triggers, preconfigured solutions, and reusable building components.”
Different types of Flows
At present, Flow can be broadly categorized into five types in Salesforce. There are mainly two types of flows
- Screen Flow
- Auto Launched Flow
The Auto Launched Flow is again divided into four more categories
- Schedule Triggered
- Record Triggered
- Platform Event Trigger
- AutoLaunched (No Trigger)
➤ Screen Flow: These flows enable users to create custom UI and guide them through a business process that can be launched from Experience Cloud, Lightning pages, quick actions, etc.
➤ Schedule Triggered Flow: Running in the background these auto-launched Flows get launched at a specified time and set frequency for every particular record in a batch.
➤ Record Triggered Flow: These flows are launched when a record is created, updated, or deleted. These auto-launched flows also run in the background.
➤ Platform Event Flow: These auto launched Flows run in the background when a platform event message is received.
➤ Auto Launched (No Trigger): Auto Launched Flows are launched when implemented by Apex, Process Builder, or Rest API. These flows run automated tasks.
How to create Flows in Salesforce
Creation of flow in Salesforce is pretty easy. Here are the steps to do so
- Go to Flow Builder, search for Flow in the Quick Find box from Set up. Select Flows and choose New Flow.
- Choose the Flow Type and then click Create
- As every element represents action, drag the element you want to execute on the canvas.
- Connect the Start element to another element to set the order in which they will be executed at run time.
- Save your flow.
Testing of Flows
Debugging is the process that is used to test Flows. Simply feed your variables and Click Debug to run through the flow.
The Winter’22 release has brought along a beta feature called Debug on Canvas for testing flows. Some of the Debugger items in Flow as released in the Winter’22 event are-
- Change Field Values Temporarily.
- Select more options when debugging a flow.
- Debug Scheduled paths in Record-Triggered Flows.
Click to read more about Debug Scheduled Paths in Record-Triggered Flows here
Conclusion
That was pretty much about the basics of Salesforce Flow. Stay tuned with us as we will be bringing more insights on Flows in our upcoming blogs.
Also, if you are interested in adopting Flows or any other Salesforce consulting services, get in touch with our Salesforce experts right away. We will be happy to help!