Process Builder – Page 2 – Salesforce Sidekick

How to Create a Conditional Auto Number

March 28, 2016October 24, 2016David Litton15 Comments

Every once and a while there is a situation where we need to have an Auto Number generated, but only for records that meet a certain criteria. Lets say that we use the Account Number field as our client’s identifier, and we want to automate this process of incrementing it one every time we have a new client. There are a few different ways that we can solve this, but we’re going to use Visual Flow.

Automation Overview:

Account Meets Criteria – Process Builder triggered (Pass inputs into Visual Flow)
Custom Object Record with Auto Number created in Flow
Lookup value of Auto Number
Update the Account

For this solution we have three different options in how we can do it architecturally (with our Auto Number):

Custom Object
Custom Metadata
Custom Settings

For me, I am going to go with using a Custom Object. I think that it is the easiest option of the three to implement, and most Salesforce Admins can relate to Custom Objects more than the other two options. So, what fields do we need create in this Custom Object? None! We just need to make sure we set the Name to be an Auto Number.

HINT: If you ever need to reset the number, you can switch the Name field to Text and then back to an Auto Number and it will let you pick the Starting Number again.

Here is what our finalized Object looks like:

Now that we have our Object ready, we can go create our Flow (Setup | Create | Workflows & Approvals | Flows).

The first step is going to be grabbing our Record Create.

We want to select the Client Number Object that we just created, and then remove the row asking us to set a field value.

Now, we want to create a variable to house the Record Id.

CreateClientNumber

Hit OK, and then we want to set this as our Starting Element.

Now, we want to grab a Record Lookup and find the Name (Auto Number) of the record we just created.

We are going to need to create a variable to store the Auto Number value that we will then Update our Account with.

FindAutoNumber

Hit OK. And now drag out the Record Update element.

We will be passing into our Flow the Account Id value, and we will want to use that here to filter on our Record Update. So we need to create the variable to store that.

Map the Client Number to the Account Number field, and hit OK.

Connect the elements together to finish our Flow.

And lastly we want to Save and then Activate our Flow!

CreateClientNumberFlowSave

Fantastic! Now we need to setup our Process Builder that fires this Flow. So lets go create a new Process Builder for this. (Setup | Create | Workflows & Approvals | Process Builder)

We want the Process Builder to fire on our Account, so for our object select Account, and for starting the process select when a record is created or edited.

This next step is completely on you for when the record meets the criteria. For my example we will just use when the Type is now a Customer. Careful with the Advanced section at the bottom, you aren’t going to want your Process Builder to fire more than once per Account!

Now we get to setup our Immediate Action of launching a Flow. All we need to do is pass in our Account Id.

Hit Save, and then hit Activate up in the top right corner… and you’re done!

Close Cases with a Quick Action

March 7, 2016October 24, 2016David Litton1 Comment

If you have used Cases in Salesforce, I am sure you’re aware of the Closed Case layout. This is great, it lets you require the fields that must be filled out before a User can close a Case. Now, the issue comes when Salesforce rolled out the Feed View in the Console. Our Users are supposed to live in the Feed, and it would be great if we could have a Quick Action for closing the Case so it is easy to use on the Desktop and Phone! However, if you’re limiting Close Statuses to the Close Case Layout, you can’t simply drag in your Status field! You’ve got to get creative! So we’ll show you how with a Quick Action and a Process Builder we can make our own customized Close Case Quick Action!

How do we do this?

Create our new Fields
Create the Quick Action
Create the Process Builder
Add the Quick Action to the Page Layout

Lets get started! First, lets create Close Status, which will mirror what your existing closed Status values are. Remember, if you add a new closed Status value, you’ll need to update it here too. Not ideal, but it is all we can do right now.

Next, we want to add in a field that will let us know our Quick Action has been fired. This will be a Checkbox field.

Now that we have all of our new fields, lets go and create a Quick Action. To do this, we want to navigate to the Buttons, Links, and Actions section under Cases. From there, we will hit New Action.

We want to now select our Action Type to be Update a Record, which means we are updating the record the action is executed on.

Now lets name our Action Close Case and then we get to do my favorite two parts of an Action! We get to create our Success Message and add our custom Icon. For those of you new to seeing the Success Message, this will be displayed after someones hits Update on our Action and close the Case. Previously we weren’t able to modify that message, but now Salesforce gave us that power! So lets use it!

For this Action I’ve got a trophy from the Lightning Design System I want to use. If you’re unfamiliar with the Lightning Design System and how you can use it to make your Actions and anything Lightning look awesome, check out my post on it!

First, lets get rid of all the fields on the default Layout.

Now, lets add in the fields that we want for our Closed Case Layout, and lets set the fields required that we want to require them to use.

As you go to save the Action you’ll see a warning message from Salesforce letting you know a required field (Status) is not on your layout. You can ignore it 🙂

Before we move on, we need to use the Predefined Field Values to our advantage, and have Close Case QuickAction set to TRUE. This will allow us to know every time the Action is pressed, and when we want to trigger our Process Builder.

Now on to creating our Process Builder! This is where the magic comes in. If you noticed, our field Close Status is not magically linked to the Status field. But, we need it to be. The reason we are using Process Builder and not a Workflow Rule is Workflow Rules are not able to pass in a dynamic value of a field, but Process Builder can! With Process Builder we will be able to make any update to the Close Status field pass into our Status Field.

Lets go create a new Process Builder for this. (Setup | Create | Workflows & Approvals | Process Builder)

Set this to have the ability to fire from the Case Object on when a record is created or edited.

For our Criteria we need it to be whenever our Close Case QuickAction boolean is TRUE. We also want to check in our Advanced section the box to make sure we don’t keep firing this Process Builder with every edit (though, our Record Update technically would stop that).

When this happens, we want to do a Record Update to change the Status to the Close Status value, and we want to reset the Close Status QuickAction field to FALSE.

Now Save & Activate the Process Builder.

To finish up, lets navigate over to the Page Layout editor and drop in our new Quick Action!

Hit Save. Now lets navigate to a Case and check out our hard work in action!

Fill out the required fields, hit Update, and watch the Case get closed!

Hopefully the simple combination of an Action and Process Builder shows you how easy it is to take your Actions to the next level!

The 6 Most Common Visual Flow Errors to Avoid

February 7, 2016October 24, 2016David Litton2 Comments

Visual Flow and Process Builder have gained adoption around the Salesforce Community. We are even allowed to Activate a Flow or Process Builder in Production without ever testing it is actually working as we intended. This means that when we develop a Process Builder or Flow we are quite likely to run into errors. These errors are the main mistakes that you should look out for when you are building a Flow. I’ve hit all of these errors, and I still continue run up against some of them. However, knowing what to lookout for will save you a headache when you do run into one!

No Access to Running Flows

This is an easy fix and you’ll only run into once (per Org that you work in). Make sure any users that need to access a Visual Flow have the System Permission Run Flows. If the End User lacks this permission and they attempt to access the Visual Flow they’ll receive an error.

Object & Field Level Security for running user

If you are using Visual Flow (not launched by Process Builder), this is an error you can run into. This can cause all kinds of issues when your Lookups, Creates, and Updates all break. This is something that you can’t really fix within your Flow, and this is strictly user permissions. This comes down to you as the Administrator knowing the level of security your users that will be using your Flow. So, make sure your End Users have the ability to do everything you want them to or they’ll get an error!

Too many SOQL queries

Fortunately this is a limit that usually only Admins run into. It is rare our End Users actually preform data loads, or use an Autolaunched Flow hits this limit. Unfortunately we don’t actually have a limit status bar as an option, and it doesn’t seem like this is coming anytime soon.

Now, when you’re building a complex Flow, you need to consider how it is going to be used. Are you likely to hit limits on? Are there other Workflow Rules, Process Builders, Auto-launched Flows, or Apex Triggers that will be touched by your automation and might cause a ‘loop’ of your automation?

The best advice I can offer for you with this error is to assume you will always hit it with data loads. But, in the case when you don’t… TEST, TEST, and TEST again. There is no magic status bar to alert you how you are tracking.

Flow SOQL.jpg

Using the wrong Field or Variable

This one is really just a User error issue. This typically happens to me when I am working late at night. Sometimes I might confuse the variable that I am looking for. Often times I find this might happen when I see people creating or doing lookups to Junction Objects. This is because we often do not use the name of the Object as our field name. For instance, if we are tracking Job postings in Salesforce and on our Application we have the Contact lookup labeled as Applicant. If I wasn’t paying attention, I could easily grab the wrong field to reference as my Contact Id… this plays into our next common error.

PittyFool AwkwardLookup

Creates with no variable as your criteria, or Updates with No Records Found

So we are excited to throw our Flow out into Production, however we didn’t realize that there might be a scenario that our Flow might get activated and one of our variables isn’t populated. This could be for a number of reasons, but it will cause you a big problem. This will get you one of our favorite FlowApplication error emails.

Now, the way we can attempt to solve this error is to use Decisions to validate that we actually found the variables that we expected to find. Take a moment and read my Decisions – Your Flow’s Test Coverage. By using this method you can hopefully avoid running into these two errors altogether!

Duplicate Value – Membership/Assignment already exists

If you are using Process Builder or Visual Flow to add a User or Contact to a membership of some sort. The main areas you’ll run into this are:

Campaign Members
Public Group Membership
Permission Set Assignment
Queue Membership

This can be avoided by doing Lookups of the existing memberships/assignments before doing the Record Create. This can get difficult when you are dealing with multiple records, as there is a limit to how many Lookups you can do (and the ‘speed’ of doing this).

Reassign Case using a Quick Action and Flow

January 11, 2016October 24, 2016David Litton20 Comments

I’ve lately been involved with quite a lot of Service Cloud implementations. One thing that I’ve noticed almost all of them have in common is that their Cases never seem to always go to the right Department – or they need to be sent to another mid-Case. The most common complaint usually has to deal with how many screens someone has to go through to successfully reassign the Case, especially if you’re in the Feed View and not the Detail View of the Service Console. If you noticed, Owner isn’t an option for us in a Record Update on the Quick Action Page Layout. So, that means we have to get creative to solve this business problem!

We need to make sure we have a few things built before we begin. In this case, we need to add two fields to our Cases.

The first field is going to be a dropdown that will allow us to mirror the list of Queues available for Cases. We will call this Assign to Queue.

Reassign to Queue

The next field we need to create is a User Lookup. This we’re going to call Assign to User. We are using this in place of the Owner field, because that isn’t allowed (at the time of this post). Note: this is a Lookup to the USER Object, not CASE. The Child Relationship Name is referring to what this Lookup would be called in relationship to the User Object on a Page Layout (if that was visible), not that it is a Lookup to the User.

User Lookup

We could make a Validation Rule to only allow one of those fields to be filled out, but we’re just going to do a decision of ‘what matters’ in our Process Builder that will ignore that being needed.

Now that we have our Custom Fields built, lets make sure every value on the Reassign to Queue field has a match!

Now that we have that taken care of, lets build our Action! Navigate to the Buttons, Links, and Actions section under Cases and then select New Action.

New Action box For this Action we are going to be doing a Record Update. This is because we are going to be updating one of the Assign to fields we created at the beginning.

Action Update a Record

You have the option to insert your own Icon here. I like to do this for my clients and even customize it to be one of the colors from their logo. I’ve got a post coming shortly on how you would do this, but for the meantime you can go checkout http://www.lightningdesignsystem.com by yourself!

Action Change Icon

Now we need to clear out default layout our Action has.

Clear Layout

To finish our Action we just need to drag in our Queue and User fields. Once you do this hit Save and you’re done with your Action!

Edit Action Layout

Now we need to go add it to our Case’s Page Layout. We want to drag it down to the Quick Actions section. If you haven’t customized your Salesforce1 Actions yet, they’ll just mirrors your Quick Actions layout.

Drag into Layout

And this is what it looks like!

Finished Action

Now, lets jump over and build out our Flow! (Setup | Create | Workflows & Approvals | Flows)

The first step is going to be grabbing our Record Lookup.

RecordLookup1

We’re going to be needing to create a variable to store our Queue Name, which we will pass in from our Process Builder.

var_QueueName

Notice, we are using a filter to make sure that Type = Queue. This is because the Group Object houses more than just Queues. It houses other types of Groups like Public Groups! We just want to make sure we bring back the correct ID in case another type of Group has the same Name.

Find Queue

Now lets create a variable to store that ID that we are looking to get.

var_QueueId

Our finished Record Lookup will look like this:

Find Queue 2

Lets set it as our starting element

The next thing we are going to do is to use a Decision to validate that we found an Id. You can read more about it in my post on using Decisions as your Test Coverage, so we won’t cover this step in detail here.

Add Decision.jpg

Now, lets drag in a Record Update element so that we can update our Case!

Drag Record Update

We want to create a variable to house our Case Id that we are going to pass in from our Process Builder. This allows us to make sure we are updating the correct Case.

var_CaseId

We need to update the OwnerId with our variable var_QueueId, and to update the Assign to Queue field with an empty string so that it can be used again.

UpdateCase

After saving our Record Update, we need to connect our elements together and then save our Flow.

Save Queue Flow.jpg

Make sure you activate your Flow or it can’t be referenced in Process Builder!

Now, our Flow is completed and activated, but right now its doing nothing! So we need to have a Process Builder trigger it. However, did you notice it seems like we’re missing something? We also have the Assign to User field. We didn’t put that in our Flow! Well, turns out we don’t need to. We can take care of that in our Process Builder!

So lets go create a new Process Builder for this. (Setup | Create | Workflows & Approvals | Process Builder)

NewProcessBuilderQueue

Set this to have the ability to fire from the Case Object on when a record is created or edited.

onCaseObject

For our Criteria we need it to be whenever our Assign to User is filled out, which would be the equivalent of saying that it isn’t null. So, lets use “is null” equals “false” as our conditions.

Criteria #1.jpg

When this happens, we want to do a Record Update to change the OwnerId to the Assign to User Id, as well as we want to clear out any values in the Assign to User and Assign to Queue fields.

Record Update in Process Builder.jpg

Now that we’ve got our first situation complete (when the Assign to User is chosen), lets work on our second one (when Assign to Queue was chosen).

Criteria #2.jpg

When we meet this criteria, we want to go to our Flow and do our query to see if we find a matching Queue. So lets create our Flow Action and pass in our variables.

Hit Save and then Activate your Process Builder and you’re done! Go grab a nice drink and enjoy your accomplishment!

Hopefully the combination of Actions, Flow, and Process Builder has got your mind racing with cool automations you can make yourself!

How to setup a recurring scheduled Process Builder and/or Flow

December 16, 2015November 27, 2017David Litton8 Comments

UPDATE

My recommendation is to use this solution by Doug instead of following the steps below: https://douglascayers.com/2016/04/18/salesforce-process-builder-scheduler/

In Apex you’re able to setup a recurring job that will fire whenever you’d like. However, now that many of the solutions that we previously needed Apex for can be solved through Process Builder and Flow, it would be great if we could setup a schedule to do batch jobs without Apex. I’ve recently come across more and more clients wanting something to run from every 15 minutes to every business day. Unfortunately, I’m not savvy enough with Apex (yet!) to feel comfortable writing a trigger just to get this added functionality. So, that is when I got creative. With just three workflow rules we are able to setup our own scheduled Flow! (So that means, we’re not actually going to be building a Flow in this post, sorry!) Continue reading →

***UPDATE***

My recommendation is to use this solution by Doug instead of following the steps below: https://douglascayers.com/2016/04/18/salesforce-process-builder-scheduler/

UPDATE