A short blog charting an evening with Flow, Lightning Experience in Winter’17…
Flow on Record Detail Pages
Flow makes its presence known in Lightning App Builder this release (in Beta) and with it some new possibilities for customising the Lightning Experience user experience, as well as Salesforce1 Mobile. I decided to focus on the Record Detail Pages as you want to see how it passes the recordId. As you can also see Flow gets an automatic face lift in this context, making them look properly at home!
This is the Screen element showing the passed information from Lighting App Builder…
By creating an Input variable in your Flow called recordId of type Text (see docs). Lightning App Builder will automatically pass in the record Id. You can also expose other input parameters, e.g. CustomMessage so long as they are Input or Input/Output.
These will display in the properties pane in Lightning App Builder. Sadly you cannot bind other field values, but this does give some nice options for making the same Flow configurable for different uses on different pages!
Flow Custom Buttons with Selection List Views
Winter’17 brings with it the ability to select records in List Views. As with Salesforce Classic UI it will show checkboxes next to records in the List View, IF a Custom Button has been added to the List View layout that required multi-selection.
In my past blog Visual Flow with List View and Related List Buttons, prior to Winter’17. I was not able to replicate the very useful ability to pass user selected records to a Flow in Lightning Experience. I am now pleased to report that this works!
This results in the flow from my previous blog showing the selected records. As you can see, sadly because we are using a Visualforce page the lovely new Flow styling we see when using Flow (Beta) support in Lightning App Builder does not apply. But hey being able to select the records is a good step forward for now! The setup of the Visualforce page and Custom Button is identical to that in my previous blog.
Summary
Flow continues to get a good level of love and investment in Salesforce releases, which pleases me a lot. Its a great tool, the only downside is with more features comes more complexity and thus a great need to stay on top of its capabilities, a nice problem to have!
March 28, 2017 at 12:16 am
Any Idea on passing more than just the RecordID into the page for the Lightning flow? I have two variables which I’m passing in, the opp ID (this is the page it’s being launched from) and the AccountID listed on the Opp. Since there is no formula builder I’ve placed {!AccountID} in the parameter and it takes, and the flow runs. However on my debug screens in the flow Account ID is blank.
November 25, 2017 at 6:43 pm
Yeah it does not support formula syntax, it only passes the recordId, see the docs, you have to name it carefully. Once you have the record Id for the account you can of course use Flows own ability to query for further fields in the Flow. https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.204.0.salesforce_vpm_guide.meta/salesforce_vpm_guide/lightning_app_builder_customize_lex_pages_considerations_flow.htm
December 29, 2017 at 11:23 am
Hi Andy,
In your blog image, I see that you have appeared to add the flow component as a “tab” within your lighting screen detail “page”. (you label the tab as “Flow demo”)
I can see that I can add a flow component to the screen in the lightning design builder, but it’s segregated as it’s own component. I don’t see how I can add it as a tab such as what you’ve done in your example. How would one go about configuring your flow component as a tab within a page screen element such as you have done? Thanks for any help!
January 4, 2018 at 6:10 pm
There is a separate tab component on the left hand side in Lightning app Builder, drag that on then drag the Flow component on