I’ve been running into a number of bizarre issues with field references in flows.

To illustrate these, I created a simple flow with a fast lookup to contact to an sobject variable named “sovContact” and a screen to display account fields.

1. Cross object field references are case sensitive.

   Works: {!sovContact.Account.Name}

   Does not work (flow will not save) {!sovcontact.account.name}

2. Regular field references will auto-correct case

   Entering {!sovcontact.firstname} into the display text element will save fine.

   However, when you reopen the screen, it will have magically had case fixed to {!sovContact.FirstName}

3. Field references to custom lookup fields on the sobject variable are auto-updated incorrectly.

   We have a field on contact that is a lookup to the corresponding salesforce user account, with API name of Salesforce_User_Account__c.

   If you click on “Select resource”...

captains log : star date april 2018 – check out this new post that allows using the lightning runtime on a flow in a visualforce page in a site. New and improved y'all. Original post is below:

The native Salesforce stay-in-touch functionality is great, unless you want to change anything at all with how it works, as there is currently nothing at all that can be modified (though there is an idea with 16,000 points that you can vote for.)

In this post I will demonstrate how, by using visual workflow embedded on a public force.com site, its possible to pass in the ID of an existing contact via a URL parameter, display the values for a non-authenticated user to edit, and to save the edits back to Salesforce.

There is one major constraint to work around. Salesforce does not permit the Site Guest User to edit contacts, so you have to use a custom “holding” object along with an...

This post is part of a series on building a replacement for stay-in-touch using visual workflow

The visualforce page is very simple, no controller required. It is designed to pull the contact ID from the query string (the URL).

This help article shows how to embed a flow in a visualforce page, and it looks like

<apex:page>
  <flow:interview name="MyUniqueFlowName"/>
</apex:page>

This help article shows how to set flow variables from a visualforce page, which then looks like

<apex:page>
    <flow:interview name="flowname">
        <apex:param name="myVariable" value="01010101"/>
    </flow:interview>
</apex:page>

Finally, this article shows how to pull parameters from the query string into a visualforce page, which looks like

$CurrentPage.parameters.parameter_name

So, putting it all together, your visualforce page would look like

<apex:page >
    <flow:interview

Not possible you say? Well, yes, technically you are correct. However, I needed to use the standard mass email functionality in Salesforce, and to include both contact merge fields (First Name, Email) and campaign merge fields (Campaign name, Start date) in a URL in an email that would be sent every month from a new campaign.

The best solution I could come up with requires a bit of cut and paste, and a clever hack, but should be foolproof in that it doesnt require manually reassembling the URL in the email - just pasting a new link for each send.

My approach was as follows:

1. create a formula field on the campaign object to pull the campaign merge fields into the URL
2. On said formula field, after the campaign merge fields, include the contact merge fields that would get populated when the email was sent.

So the formula field, simplified to only include one Campaign field and one...

This will be a quick and dirty overview of using Fast lookups, loops, assignments, and Fast Create elements to iterate through a collection of records and create N number of child records.

Its awesome. Caveat - I brute forced my way through this due to a recent need and cannot say whether or not any of this is “correct”, but it works. There are likely governor limits and what-not that may pop up in production scenarios, and I will try to hit on those where I can.

So the sample use case I will model is as follows - take all of the contacts in an account and add them to a campaign. This requires the following steps

1. Fast lookup - lookup all contacts in the account and assign them to an Sobject collection of contacts

2. Loop through the Sobject collection of contacts, and for each record, do the following
   -create a Campaign Member Sobject variable record using the contact ID, and a fixed...

Over the past year, I have been working on a number of integrations using Jitterbit, focused on moving HR data to various systems.

We initially went for a transactional approach, where operations would be triggered by outbound messages. That turned out to not work well with the Netsuite API, without purchasing a rather expensive user license that would allow concurrent API sessions. However, at the time we needed to “throttle” SFDC outbound messages, which can contain up to 200 records at a time, so that they processed one record at a time. I’m recording how we did this here, as I’m sure I will need to reference it later.

Its quite easy to do, once you have created an web service operation to consume the outbound message (will post on that later).

The outbound message operation in Jitterbit has 3 components

1. Web service method
2. Transformation
3. Response

In order to throttle the...

We needed a dynamic approval process for our new HR system (FinancialForce HCM), where the 3 approvers for a consultant job requisition needed to be based on the budget managers for the related department, cost center, and region. Budget manager is a custom lookup field to user.

I quickly came across this article on developer.force.com and got ready to spin up a SOW to get some developers working on it. The code is needed to lookup a user on a reference object, and populate that user into the record being submitted for approval.

And then i realized that a flow could easily pull an ID from the user lookup on the parent record and dump it to a custom field on the child. However, I would need an apex plugin to kick off the approval process from the flow.

Back to the developers to build an apex plugin…

And then, whilst browsing the great cloud flow posts on salesforce yoda’s website...

WE have rolled out FinancialForce HCM, fka Vana HCM. In an rather conventional move, we did our development in a sandbox, and deployed our changes to production.

Most of the deployment was regular run-of-the-mill workflows, a few custom fields, and maybe a validation rule or two. Nothing worth writing about, until I tried deploying the permission sets.

FFHCM manages all permissions in a permission set. We had 3 permission sets to deploy, all of which were custom permission sets, but they referenced manage fields in managed objects.

I had no idea what I was in for. The FF folks came up w/ an interesting solution for deploying field and object permissions. These can be deployed in a data job, as these exist as data and metadata at the same time. I’m not sure how an update would work, but for the create it was quite straightforward. See the 3rd post on this success thread for...

With headless flows making their way to pilot, and hopefully production by summer, my mind has been tinkering away on what I will do w/ them.

I just received confirmation that the flows will run in system mode, like a workflow rule, which adds many possibilities. For example, presumably the flow should be able to update a field on the running user’s user record.

This would allow triggering a notification the first time (and only the first time) a user does a specific action. Simply create a checkbox for every action you want to measure, say creating a lead. Create a workflow rule which fires when the lead is created, with criteria of: $User.Has_Created_Lead__c = FALSE. That triggers an immediate email to the user that says “hey, nice work, way to create your first lead,” and it also triggers a headless flow that updates the checkbox to TRUE, so that it will never fire again.

Now...

With 400 users across 20-odd countries, I am always looking for ways to make them more productive and efficient.

While much can be done at the role, profiles, and permission set level, at times the customization needs to be at the user level, and cant be generalized to a higher level of abstraction. Pulling this off without adding huge administrative overhead is possible! Read on…

We use an object that hangs off opportunities to allocate the total amount by program and location. Salesforce is not the system of record, but this object is key to dividing our pipeline across various programs and countries, and therefore these “funding links” are used by each and every country, and most people end up using the same set of codes most of the time.

So I wanted to allow each user to have a default set of codes, so that they can quickly create a record using their own personal default...