Avoid Custom Code with New Salesforce Lightning Flows features

Lightning Flows has been continuously evolving in the recent Salesforce releases and have given a new meaning to declarative development. The features that Salesforce has included in this declarative development tool has been game changing for Salesforce Administrators and Developers.

Lightning Flows have not only championed the backend process automations but have also brought in a whole new dimension to user facing screen flows. With the new developments in Lightning Flows they can now be triggered directly on a record event and the need for tying them up with a record event using Process Builders is no longer a pre-requisite.

With every release Salesforce is bringing in new innovations in Lightning Flows that are brining Lightning Flows closer to the vision of building an equivalent of Apex programming through clicks and not code.

While there are a number of new features that have been added to Lightning Flows in the recent past, here are my top picks from the recent Winter’21 Release which has enabled to meet business requirements with Clicks instead of writing custom apex code and lightning components :

Lightning Flow can now be run not just on change of records but on specific changes. This becomes particularly useful for scenarios where the flow needs to be fired only on change of certain fields like Status of a record. Running flow on specific record changes prevents the unnecessary creation of Flow threads and does not require the developers to handle repeated flow invocation. This comes in very handy while handling scenarios like sending of emails on change of Status or updating child records on change of a specific related record field.

Single column layouts on Screen Flows have at many time proven to be a wastage of screen real estate. Single column layouts also lead to a longer screen with a scroll resulting in poor user experience. With multi column screens admins can create a structured screen layout with related information stacked together in a single column. This not just provides more structure to screen but also allows the user to a complete view in a single snapshot without navigating up and down on the screen. The multi-column screens are responsive in nature and the columns stack up vertically when viewing on a mobile layout as show below.

With the latest features debugging an auto-launched lightning flow has become very intuitive and easy. With the earlier version running a flow in debug mode would provide a list of steps which the flow took, however going through the text information required knowing the information about each of the flow steps.

With the new screen debugging feature, debugging and tracing the path of lightning flows is as simple as following the arrows on screen. The screen debugging makes it very easy to follow the path the flow took and also optionally provides each element’s SOQL activity and query limits.

Debug on canvas is available as a beta feature as of now and is available for evaluation.

Another highly productive feature of Lightning Flow that has been released recently is the ability to track the flow error. Tracking the flow error through the error notifications can be really difficult at times and can consume a lot of time in identifying the step at which the error occurred. Now the admins and developers can directly identify the error step and get it highlighted on a the canvas with the click of a link that is included in the error message. Landing directly on the error step through the message is definitely going to be a big productivity booster and result in quicker error resolutions.

Say good bye to the manual alignment of flow elements and clunky looking flows because of the elements that are slightly misaligned. The new Auto layout feature aligns all the components of the flow automatically and makes it much more understandable as compared to free form flows. The auto-layout provides clickable ‘+’ buttons between the steps that can be used to insert elements between any two elements and that too without messing the alignments. Pretty neat ! At any point the users have the ability to switch back to the free form layout using the toggle provide on the canvas.

With the rapid evolution of Lightning Flows Salesforce is ensuring that Admins are empowered with the tools to develop elegant and powerful applications for their users declaratively. These are some of the new cool features which I personally like in latest release , which has enabled to avoid custom code . So next time if you are looking at building a functionality through custom components or Apex, do have a look at lightning flows to build your app through clicks and not code.

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