In my last blog, I wrote briefly on the changes coming to flows and why they were exciting. Flows are some of my favourite pieces of functionality in Salesforce; it’s coding without actually writing code. What’s not to love? When I saw that – once again – flows featured massively in the release notes, I’m ashamed to say I got a little excited.
Whenever there’s a new release out, the first thing I do is check the release notes.
So, like last time, let’s have a look at what’s changing:
1: System mode flows (or not!)
This one is fairly brilliant. For those of you in the dark, system mode on salesforce is a little bit like having view all data/modify all data. It means you can do whatever you like. Using flows to bypass the security model when it’s called for is a fantastic development, and I’m excited to play around with it.
2: Flows triggering before updates
This one needs a little bit of explanation. Currently, flows and processes run towards the end of what’s known as the save order of execution in Salesforce. Critically, flows currently run after what’s known as the “initial save”. This is when the data you want to write to the server has been stored, ready to be committed properly into the server at the end of the transaction.
This change will allow you to modify data before that initial save to Salesforce, which is fantastic news for those of you hitting your governor limits (this is fast! Waiting is not).
3: Flows are getting easier to use
Alright, I’ll admit it – this snippet of information comes from one of the salesforce community pages. This feature won’t be coming to a flow builder near you in the immediate future, but the word is that features from the process builder are going to be incorporated into flow builder. Think of flows built on rails where you don’t have to define certain types of variables, where everything is just a little more user friendly.
This isn’t an exhaustive list of everything that’s coming to flows in the near future. That said, what we do have coming is fantastic, and it’s brilliant to see the team working so hard on making flows more and more powerful as time goes on. I can’t wait to see what’s around the corner!
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