Salesforce puts out some fantastic new features into the Flow tool with every release, and it’s important to recognize them as they come! The Salesforce Flow Repeater component has been around for a while now, but Salesforce continues to enhance it with new functionality.
Let’s take a look at the Repeater component for Screen Flow and all the ways it can be used to help make your screen flows come to life!
A Brief History of the Repeater Component
The Repeater component was first introduced in Spring ‘24 and provided a way for admins to configure screen flows that could capture multiple of the same piece or pieces of information from end users. Rather than having to manually create multiple of the same field or use a third-party tool to handle this, it was as simple as dragging and dropping the component onto the page.
Winter ‘25 brought about the additional ability to prepopulate data into the Repeater rather than just add empty field values. Additionally, admins could toggle the ability for end users to add their own items and also toggle the ability for users to remove prepopulated items.
Why Is the Repeater Component Valuable?
Picture this: you’re building a form and need the ability to capture dietary preferences and allergies. While this sounds relatively straightforward, you realise you’ve hit a stumbling block. Not only do you need to capture the allergy but also the severity of the allergies (minor, moderate, life-threatening). The problem is those darn humans are complex and may have more than one allergy! How are you supposed to know how many fields you’ll need to create?
You come up with an idea and begin building it out. You’re going to have a page dedicated to the capturing of a single allergy and just repeat that out as many times as required depending on the number of allergies. While this works in theory, the experience designer in you knows that’s a lot of clicks and waiting time. Surely, there’s a better way!
Enter the Repeater component.
With the Repeater component for Screen Flow, you’re able to adjust your Flow so that you can capture as many allergies as required from a single screen. This is a much better experience for your end users and a lot simpler for you to build as well.
Recent changes to the Repeater component mean that you can also prefill information that you already know about your end users. If you’ve captured allergy information in the past and are looking more for confirmation of allergy rather than requesting that they input that information again, you can! You’ve also got the ability to disallow user input and create what is essentially a Read-Only Repeater if required.
How to Use the Repeater Component and the Data It Captures
Repeater is a component exclusive to Screen Flow, so you won’t be able to use it with auto launched or triggered flows. To add a Repeater to a Screen element in a Screen Flow, simply search for it (or scroll for it if you have the time) and drag it into the screen where you’d like it to be visible.
Once the empty Repeater is in the canvas, simply add your other components inside of it to capture a single iteration of the data you’re looking to gather from your user (in this example, I’ll continue on with the allergy example I started with earlier).
When data is captured within a Repeater, it is added to a collection, which you can then handle almost as you would any other (there are some restrictions, such as the inability to use these in the Transform element – more on these considerations in the next section of this article). In this example, I’m assigning the allergy information to a new Allergy record variable and then adding that to a collection to be inserted after the loop.
You’ll notice that the Collection variable can be found within the name of the Screen (in this case, “New Contact”), and then within the name of the component from within the screen (in this case, “AllergyRepeater”). You also have the ability to select from the following options:
- All Items: Includes every iteration of the Repeater after the user runs it.
- Added Items: Includes only the newly added items if there was prepopulated data.
- Prepopulated Items: Includes only the items that were prepopulated before the Flow ran.
- Removed Items: Includes any items that the user removed during the run.
Things to Remember About the Repeater Component
While it’s a great tool, there are a number of things to remember when you’re using the Repeater component. You can read a full summary of the considerations on the Salesforce Help page, but to save you some time, I’ve highlighted what I believe to be the most important of the lot.
First and foremost, not every Screen component is supported within the Repeater component. For example, you cannot place an Action Button within a Repeater. Additionally, the output of the Repeater isn’t able to be used in a Transform, Collection Filter, Collection Sort, or in another Repeater. The Repeater component allows users to add up to 30 instances at runtime (meaning you can ‘repeat’ the data collection up to 30 times).
The AllItems output is empty when the Repeater contains only display elements (like Display Text) or when the user doesn’t add any instances on execution. Additionally, the AllItems output is null (different from empty) when all the components within the Repeater are hidden by conditional field visibility.
Summary
The Repeater Component for Screen Flow is one of those simple ideas that have a big impact for Salesforce customers and declarative automation enthusiasts alike. Rather than having to create a page loop or try to guess the maximum number of iterations an end user may need, the Repeater component means you can simply build out the repeatable interface in one go and have the data handled neatly.
End users will benefit as they don’t need to loop through the same page, and they can add as many instances as they need.
Comments: