Salesforce Sidekick

Dynamic Record Choices are one of the coolest features in Visual Flow that often gets overlooked.  In this post we’ll be going over a brief introduction of what and how Dynamic Record Choices might be used.  I’ll be following this post up with an in-depth dive of how you use these in different scenarios.  So, what is a Dynamic Record Choice?

A Dynamic Record Choice is a query on an Object in Salesforce that you may add filters to, and have those results presented to your End User for selection.  The records that you return will be dynamic based on your filters, and the End User can select one or multiple records to perform an action on.

I like to think of it as a Report or a List View.  You select your Object, add your Filters, and then let the User select the record(s) they want to work.

Let’s say your Sales team that wants Tasks to be entered with minimal fields and effort.  Sales Users are annoyed because the Contact lookup on Tasks is not filtering to just Contacts on the Account record they’re on.  Dynamic Record Choice would come in with the Contact selection, as you can provide that list of Contacts and allow them to have a short-list of those Contacts.  Here is a visual comparison between Standard functionality and Dynamic Record Choice:

As you can tell, the End User Experience is going to be easier with the Dynamic Record Choice.  With Standard you’ve got to search, and with Dynamic Record Choice you’re able to present a dropdown (or multi-select picklist/checkboxes).  You can grab variables for filtering from anywhere in Salesforce very easily, since you’ll be using Flow.  It also allows you to be flexible and select multiple records at once and perform the same action on all of them.

Let’s talk about some negatives here… #1 is we have very Limited Labels.  Unfortunately, the only option we have is to concatenate a group of fields together to give more “information” about the results.  If many “columns” of information are needed, then Dynamic Record Choice might not be the right solution for you.

The second negative is something that is a Flow limitation.  Dynamic Record Choices have User Inputted Filters.  Some complicated filters simply aren’t possible in Flow.  To add, if you do want a filter from an End User, it needs to be on another screen.  Sometimes the clicks can make the End User experience negative.

Recap: Dynamic Record Choices rock and you should look at how they might streamline your End User’s lives.  They’re not like duck tape, because they can’t fix every problem, but they’re pretty awesome.  Dealing with a Dynamic Record Choice can be difficult the first few times, because there are a few moving parts to it, so be patient and make sure you’re testing thoroughly that the variables are all being passed through.