Learn MOAR About Lightning Flow Goodies Coming in Summer ’20

Discover Summer ’20 Release features! We are sharing five release highlights for admins and developers, curated and published by our evangelists as part of Learn MOAR. Complete the trailmix by July 31, 2020, to get a special community badge and unlock a $10 contribution to Bibliothèques Sans Frontières (Libraries Without Borders).

The Salesforce Summer ’20 release is upon us, and with it comes a lot of awesome features for the #Flownatics among you. Unfortunately, we can’t dig into every single one. Instead, here are the top five enhancements we think you’ll be excited about.

Some of these enhancements haven’t made their way into the official Salesforce Summer ’20 Release Notes yet, but trust us – the release notes are coming! And so are the enhancements to your org with the Summer ’20 release.

1. Start flows from a record save or a platform event.

Flows, flows, everywhere! Continuing our quest for worldwide flow domination, we’ve added new and exciting ways to trigger a flow.

The first is our after-save flow trigger. In Spring ’20, we released a before-save flow trigger, which allows you to quickly and easily update fields on the record being saved. Now, with after-save triggers, you can access an even wider set of actions, so you can do complex follow-ups like trigger an invocable action or update a related record.

Our second new trigger is our platform event flow trigger. This allows you to create a flow that will trigger any time a platform event is received.

If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed we are slowly closing the gap between Process Builder and Flow Builder, so you don’t need to go in between tools. Summer ’20 takes a big step in that direction with these two triggers, but there are a few things still to add — notably, tracking whether particular record values have changed and waiting to schedule follow-up actions. If you need that functionality, we recommend continuing to use Process Builder.

Resources

• Salesforce Summer ’20 Release Notes: Trigger a Flow That Performs Actions After a Record Is Saved
• Salesforce Summer ’20 Release Notes: Trigger a Flow When a Platform Event Message Is Received

2. Track the usage of your org’s screen flows.

Have you ever wanted to track adoption of the flows in your org? Or perhaps calculate how long it takes users to complete a task that you’ve automated with a flow? We are happy to announce that you can track the answers to those questions via your old friends, reports and dashboards. In Summer ’20, we started tracking screen flow usage in two new objects.

• Flow Interview Logs tracks information about a given instance of a flow – which we call an “interview”.
• Flow Interview Log Entries tracks information about each screen within an interview.

Armed with these objects, you can track answers to the questions above, as well as things like how often users navigate backwards in a flow, which screen users spend the most time on, and how often errors occur for a given flow, or which flows have been paused for long enough that you’d consider them abandoned.

To get started, take a look at the out-of-the-box report, “Sample Flow Report: Screen Flows”. It includes data for screen flows that users started, paused, and finished, and screen flows in which users clicked Next over the last 7 days. Autolaunched flows and flows that don’t require user interaction aren’t logged.

If that report doesn’t meet your needs, clone it to make your own changes or build your own from scratch by using the new “Screen Flows” report type. Go crazy and build your very own dashboard dedicated to screen flow usage in your org.

And now, some things you should be aware of:

• Data Access: Users with View All Data can see everyone’s flow log data. A given flow user can see log data only related to their flow interactions, but you can elevate those permissions by updating the sharing settings for the Flow Interview Logs object.
• Limits on Historical Data: We keep the last 31 days’ worth of flow log data, and the Flow Interview Log Entries object caps out at 7 million records per month. For more details about these limits, take a look at the release note for this feature.
• Report Performance: We limit the default report to the last 7 days for performance reasons. If you’re using a larger range, be aware that the report is tracking a large number of records and could suffer performance-wise.
• Long Duration: If a given screen or flow has a very long duration, like hundreds of minutes, it’s likely because the user navigated away from the screen for a while instead of pausing it. Consider filtering the report to show only entries where the element duration was less than 30 minutes.

Resources

• Salesforce Summer ’20 Release Notes: Analyze Screen Usage Data

3. Say hello to easier-to-configure loops.

The Summer ’20 release includes two enhancements that will make your loop-building life easier.

Variables, schmariables

We’ve been trying to reduce the amount of work you have to put into tracking data as it moves through the flow. This year, we started automatically storing the results of screen components, actions, or Create or Get Records elements so you don’t have to. With Summer ’20, we applied the same treatment to the Loop element, which means we now generate the “loop variable” for you. Huzzah!

Look Ma, no hands! You no longer have to manually create a variable for your loop to use.

Later in your flow, you’ll see a resource called “Current Item from Loop My_Loop”, where My_Loop is the API name of that loop element. In all the places you normally would have referenced your manual loop variable, select this autogenerated resource instead.

Got existing loops and loop variables? This enhancement doesn’t affect your existing customizations.

Resources

• Salesforce Summer ’20 Release Notes: Coming soon!

Loop guidance

Raise your hand if you’ve ever forgotten to “close the loop.” (By that we mean connecting the final element within your loop to the Loop element itself.) You can’t see, but I’m raising both hands. It’s a super common mistake that affects even the flow experts among us. Now, Guidance for Flow Builder will let you know when you’ve forgotten to close your loop. These new tips are on by default for everyone, but you can mute them by going to the Help Menu.

You may also notice the Help Menu has gotten a makeover since last release. We now include easy access to keyboard shortcuts, relevant Trailhead content, and the Salesforce Automation group on the Trailblazer Community. In case you don’t already have these resources bookmarked, they’re just two clicks away.

Resources

• Salesforce Summer ’20 Release Notes: Take Some Tips from Guidance for Flow Builder

4. Pass the whole record directly into your flow.

Have you ever found yourself befuddled trying to figure out how to tell your flow what record you’re looking at when you call that flow? Struggled to remember to call a Get Records after setting recordId?

Starting in Summer ’20, if you’re configuring a flow on a Record page in Lightning App Builder, you automatically see all record variables available for input in the properties pane. With one tick, you can pass all the record’s values into that record variable in your flow. No more messing with text variables.

To do the same thing with a quick action, you still need to create a variable called “recordId”, but that variable can now be a Record variable instead of a Text one.

Why should you use a Record variable instead of a Text variable here? With a Text variable, you can pass only the record’s ID into the flow, which means that you have to use a Get Records element to get other details from the record, like the owner ID or associated revenue. If instead you use a Record variable, those other values are passed in along with the record ID. No additional Get Records required!

Resources

• Salesforce Summer ’20 Release Notes: Pass In the Record When Launching a Flow from a Lightning Page or a Quick Action

5. Better debugging for flawless flows!

While we’d all love to build our flow right the first time, the ability to test and debug the flow is just as important. We want to catch issues before our customers do, build confidence in our flow’s automation of business problems, and quickly troubleshoot any problems that come our way.

In Summer ’20, we’ve add several new features to help you do just that.

• You can now run a scheduled flow in the debugger! This was one of our top pieces of feedback for scheduled flows, so we prioritized it for this release.
• We’ve given you the option to choose records to pass into an input variable. Previously, we allowed this for variables like Text or Number, but now, variables of type Record will show a search box where you can pick a real object from your org.
• Lastly, we’ve implemented Rollback Mode. This is a setting on autolaunched flows which allows you to “roll back” changes you’ve made to your data. So if your flow updates an object in the database, we roll it back when your flow finishes running in debug. This can allow you to test the same item several times over and confirm that changes are happening as you expect. There are some caveats about where Rollback Mode will or won’t work, so check out the release notes for all the fine print.

It’s important to note that although Rollback Mode may allow for safer debugging, we always recommend building and testing new flows in a sandbox org before deploying to production. Let’s be careful out there!

Resources

• Salesforce Summer ’20 Release Notes: Debug More Flows Faster

MOAR Resources

Keep your eye on the Lightning Flow section of the Salesforce Summer ’20 Release Notes. More release notes will be published for Summer ’20 flow enhancements over the coming weeks.

As always, the best places to learn more about flow are via Trailhead and the Trailblazer Community. Here are our top picks, based on the contents of this post. (Trailhead content will respect Spring ’20 until every org has upgraded to the Summer ’20 release.)

• Trailhead module: Flow Basics
• Trailhead module: Screen Flow Distribution
• Join the Salesforce Automation Trailblazer Community Group to ask questions and provide feedback