Follow and complete a Learn MOAR Spring ’23 trailmix for admins or developers by March 31, 2023, 11:59 p.m. PT to earn a special community badge and be automatically entered for a chance to win one of five $200 USD Salesforce Certification vouchers. Restrictions apply. Learn how to participate and review the Official Rules by visiting the Trailhead Quests page.
#AwesomeAdmins love to automate, and I’m so excited to share updates in Spring ’23 that will give admins even MOAR ways to automate with Flow Builder.
I am so happy to announce that the dreaded ITERATION_LIMIT_EXCEEDED error is now gone! This was a Flow-specific limit that triggered when your flow hit 2,000 elements across the Flow interview—typically seen with larger loops.
For a long time, the limit existed to protect orgs from runaway flows, but over time we built in more governor limit awareness into the Flow engine. We now feel confident that it’s no longer needed, which is great news for you loopers!
Note: For your existing flows to take advantage of this, you’ll need to ensure you’ve updated the Flow’s API version.
You can now create actions that make calls to external web services from within Flow Builder without any need for code!
Create HTTP callouts from this new button:
Add a named credential to handle the authentication:
In Spring ‘23, only GET calls are supported. Set up any needed query parameters:
After you provide a sample JSON response, Flow will generate a matching data structure that can be accessed in Flow Builder without code.
The actions you create with the new HTTP callout feature become permanent, reusable actions you can add to any flow. You can view and manage these permanent actions from the updated External Services page:
Feature Overview
Documentation sticklers (like me) rejoice! You can now easily see an element’s description by hovering over the new documentation bubble next to an element. This will allow builders to easily see the notes others have left for each individual element. Note that the new documentation bubble icon will display only for elements with a description.
Before this release it wasn’t possible to see an element’s entire description. You can now hover over the information bubble to see what an element does—a great addition for newer Flow builders.
In Winter ‘23 we released the Beta version of our Data Table component and we’re taking it across the finish line in Spring ‘23! Some of the notable new features include:
We’re introducing two new ways for Flow builders to create record lookup experiences in screen flows: lookup supported in record fields through Dynamic Forms for Flow, and Choice Lookup (Beta).
Lookup supported in record fields (Dynamic Forms for Flow)
Drag your object’s lookup fields directly onto your flow screen, which saves you oodles of time. Aside from the simple configuration, it also lets your users create records from within the flow—a hotly requested feature now made possible. Once the user creates the record, the lookup will automatically be populated with the new record.
Choice Lookup (Beta)
In addition to Radio Buttons, Checklist Groups, and Picklist choice components, you can now represent your Flow choice options in a lookup format using the new Choice Lookup component. Flow builders have long asked for the ability to filter down a collection of records in a lookup based on the actions a user takes in their flow. Using a filtered collection choice set, you can now do something like show contacts only from a previously selected account in your flow.
Because this new component is powered by choices, you can also represent your object picklist fields in this new format with picklist choice sets, like the standard Account Type Picklist field:
The goodies don’t end there! One awesome behavior of Choice Lookup is that when a user clicks into the field, they’ll see all the available choices. This addresses a 23,000-point IdeaExchange post related to lookup fields on the platform.
Lastly, you’ll notice something different about the way you reference the selected value from a Choice Lookup compared to other choices like a Radio Group or Checkbox Group component. We’ve added the ability for users to explicitly choose between the selected choice’s label(s) or value(s).
Many builders have encountered a key issue when they’ve referenced a choice in a formula—it would always return the choice’s label when it needed to return the choice’s value. Now you’ll have a choice between the two.
Which lookup experience do I choose?
With three different record lookup options, we’ll admit that choosing between the three could get confusing. Over time it’s our goal to converge functionality between Dynamic Forms lookup fields and Choice Lookup, but for now, here’s a helpful chart comparing the feature sets.
We’ve now added multi-select picklist field type support to take full advantage of the record type awareness feature we built last release in Winter ‘23. Before this release you would’ve needed to set up a Checkbox Group component with a configured picklist choice set. Now all you need to do is drag over the multi-select fields from the Fields tab in your screen editor.
You’ll also notice the multi-select experience differs quite a bit from a multi-select choice. Record field-based multi-selects mirror the multi-select experience found in record pages.
Record field multi-select experience
Multi-select picklist choice experience
At long last our reactive screen components effort enters Beta! With reactive screen components, you’ll be able to build bigger, more engaging screens by configuring your screen components so that they react to a user’s actions on the same screen.
Previously, for a component to react to changes in another component, you had to put them into separate screens or create large, monolithic custom components. For example, you’ll now be able to connect a Text input and feed the changes in the Text input to a custom data table to search for knowledge articles as user types.
This release marks the beginning of a slew of screen flow enhancements focused on flow interactivity. While the Pilot enabled custom Lightning component reactivity, the Beta now includes additional components like Text, Date, Date Time, Checkbox, and Number. Components made reactive during the Pilot should continue to work as before assuming they adhere to Lightning Web Component (LWC) flow screen component best practices.
No code example
In this example using all standard components, I created a “Contact Quick Edit” flow that lets the user select and edit a set of contacts from a data table. Whenever the user selects a row, the selected row’s details get passed into supported inputs on the same screen. Here we pass in the selected row’s details to a set of Address, Name, Date, and Text inputs.
Developers and admins will be able to use more modular, reusable components that can communicate with each other. In Addition, developers can offload simple UI elements to Flow while focusing on the complexity and value of their own custom components.
Before, developers and admins would have needed to create giant screen components in order to achieve the same level of inter-component communication, which hindered reusability.
Opt into the Beta
You can opt in to the Beta by enabling the permission in Process Automation Settings.
Supported ‘reactive’ components in Spring ‘23
**Component must be designed to track change events from Flow as outlined here.
Note that choices, formulas, display text, and record fields (Dynamic Forms for Flow) are not yet reactive, but are high on our list of things to support.
Stay tuned for a more in-depth best practices guide for wiring up your custom LWCs to be reactive.
Join the Reactive Screen Components group in the Trailblazer Community to discuss use cases, check out reactive custom components, and get updates from the Product team.
You can now convert many of your Process Builder processes to Flow using the new migration tool. Check out these three easy steps to move your processes to Flow:
1. Select your process you want to convert.
2. Select the process’s criteria nodes that you want to move to Flow.
3. Test and edit your flow.
We heavily recommend you make edits to the converted flows, such as changing element and resource names and descriptions to make the converted flow more human-readable.
For example, the flow converted here uses auto-naming for a formula resource that sets a case description, but it could use a little human love:
Creating a new orchestration is now far more discoverable. We’ve added record-triggered orchestrations to the ‘New Flow’ modal that appears when creating a new flow. If you need to access an autolaunched orchestration, you can still access that through the All + Templates tab.
The Work Guide component is now viewable on phones and tablets, which ensures your users’ running orchestrations can now participate in an orchestration on the go.
Need to reuse an orchestration? You can now save orchestrations as a template so your users or customers don’t have to start from scratch.
The ability to run flows in Slack is now GA! Here’s a Getting Started guide.
With the new MuleSoft Services page in Setup, you can now connect directly to the Anypoint Platform with a simple login, then use this connection to discover and register REST APIs from your Anypoint Platform as an External Service.
This makes the process of connecting to the Anypoint Platform significantly easier and faster, which saves you countless steps.
Our friends in Service Cloud released an excellent action called Search Individual as part of their improvements to linking unknown callers to a case and a Salesforce contact or lead. This new action allows you to perform a fuzzy search for contact, lead, and individual records and then display those results in something like a data table. From there, you can use the record(s) the user selected to then relate them to a case, account, or an opportunity as an example.
The action outputs a collection of IDs, so be sure to use that IN operator to convert it to a record collection before you throw the results into something like a data table.
Don’t forget to tune in to the Spring ’23 Release Readiness Live: Admin Preview on January 20, 2023, to see demos of a subset of these new, exciting features. Add the broadcast to your calendar today! And be sure to check out the Learn MOAR Spring ’23 for Admins Trailmix and follow along on the blog this week for more Learn MOAR!
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