It should come as no surprise to any seasoned Salesforce professional that there are always new and exciting features coming to the product with each major release. Salesforce delivers us gifts three times a year (Spring, Summer, and Winter in the Northern Hemisphere) in the form of new additions to their platform, such as Salesforce Flow. These changes and enhancements are usually selected through the IdeaExchange’s prioritization process.
But what is the IdeaExchange? What is prioritization? How can you directly impact the development of Salesforce Flow itself?
What Is IdeaExchange?
The Salesforce IdeaExchange was introduced as a way to share ideas with the wider Trailblazer Community and also directly with Salesforce product managers. Salesforce enthusiasts from around the world will post their ideas so that they can be shared and upvoted by others.
If you have a great idea that you think could benefit a large number of Salesforce users, it’s probably an idea worth sharing with the Trailblazer Community through the IdeaExchange!
Make sure you first run a search to see if it’s something that someone else has already posted. If it hasn’t, then share it so that others who also find it helpful can upvote and collaborate with you through the comments.
What Is Prioritization?
Just like the tri-annual major upgrades from Salesforce, the IdeaExchange is scoured and ideas are shortlisted three times per year so that the Salesforce product managers know what their customers are most interested in seeing adopted into the Salesforce platform.
The ideas that are up for prioritization are usually the ones that Salesforce keep their closest eye on. Product managers create a shortlist of the most upvoted ideas and then users will vote from the shortlist on which should be implemented. The results will then have a direct impact on the product roadmap at Salesforce.
Salesforce Flow Ideas to Vote For
1. Map Collection Type in Flow
If you’re a developer who uses Flow, you’ve likely noticed the absence of a Map Collection type. For those who aren’t familiar with what a Map is, it is similar to a List Collection except that it essentially holds two connected values together at once – this is known as a key-value pair. Your key may be an I.D and the value might be the entire record.
Enabling a Map Collection in Salesforce Flow would reduce the amount of loop-within-loop logic that compares two Collection together by looping through one, and nesting a second loop to compare to another Collection. It would also enable admins and developers to default back to Apex less in scenarios like these.
2. Flow Folders for Easier Organizing
Although there are already a number of methods of filtering Flows by specific values in List Views, and organising by object in Flow Trigger Explorer, it would be beneficial to organize your Flows into custom folders. These folders would allow Flows that don’t share any value-based similarities and instead are grouped simply according to business requirements.
This functionality exists already for Reports and Dashboards and is even more critical now that Workflow Rules and Process Builder have been deprecated. With Flow being the main form of declarative automation it makes sense to give admins and developers a bit more control over how they organize themselves.
3. Record-Triggered Flows on Formula Value Changes
I can hear the comments already, and I’m sure the original poster and the commenters related to this Idea are also aware of how formula fields are calculated on the fly. That being said, it would be possible for Salesforce to keep an eye on fields that drive formula fields and recalculate the formulas when records are saved to see if a formula field value could trigger a Flow.
Think back to your earlier days on the Salesforce platform – whether it was Flow or another tool, I’m sure you’ve attempted to use a formula field as a means to trigger automation. It makes logical sense in some cases as well. Rather than using Flow Entry Criteria and Decisions to replicate what is already stored in a formula field as the means to trigger an automation, why not just calculate behind the scenes and allow for Record-Triggered Flows to fire when they meet criteria?
4. Generative AI Flow Summary Generation
As the ‘Age of AI’ dawns, now seems like the perfect time to revisit this concept from a new perspective. We all know how important it is to document your Flows, but what if they could document themselves? As Salesforce (along with many others in the industry) invests more and more into Generative AI, it stands to reason that it could be used to bring clarity to what has been built with a Flow.
What if Salesforce could read your Flow, figure out what it does at a high level, and provide a brief summary of the automation so that admins and developers can understand it at a high level? Better yet – what if this was tied together with the ability to search for functionality within a Flow? The possibilities are endless, and the time is better now than it has ever been before.
5. More Flexible Lookup Component
Adam White recently commented on this in November 2023 and provided an update on it, so we may see some traction very soon.
The idea is simple – what if the recently released Lookup component provided a little more flexibility in terms of its search functionality? Instead of just being able to query a specific object, what if users could search across multiple?
There are implications here in terms of query vs search alongside a major underlying change to the Lookup component. However, this is one of the things that was addressed by Salesforce. The current future of the Lookup component is the Choice Lookup reactive component, but Salesforce is also evaluating the future of the current Lookup component too. A majority of the issues with it are due to the older API that is provided by the Salesforce Platform, and this is something that they’re aware of. The future is bright!
Bonus – Easy Bypass of Flows When Importing Data
Wouldn’t it be great if you could insert data into Salesforce EXACTLY as it is in your source file? That’s what this idea points out! If you pre-configure your source data to contain specific values and be structured in a certain way, the native Salesforce tool offered by Salesforce should be able to allow for this data to be imported without being touched by automation.
While it is technically possible to bypass Flow and other automation by temporarily turning them off or applying some specific filter criteria (i.e. if Custom Setting “Turn off Flow” is TRUE, end the Flow), this idea proposes a simple bypass in the UI. This would empower businesses to perform imports during business hours without needing to switch Flows off, which would allow the rest of the business to continue operating as normal.
Summary
Life is what you make of it, and Salesforce can be made better through your own ideas too! Full credit to the team at Salesforce that makes these things happen, but it’s important to appreciate that your ideas matter.
That’s why Salesforce brought the IdeaExchange to life in the first place. If you’re experiencing an issue with Salesforce, there’s a high chance that someone else is experiencing it too. That’s the beauty of the Trailblazer Community – we all help each other, we all share similar experiences, and we can all help to make Salesforce stronger as we move forward.
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