Today I’m going to do some researches with one of these #clicksnotcode features that Salesforce provides in the Platform, Visual Flow. Ok, this is not a hot topic now, but if we want to check how it works in Lightning Experience (LEX from now onwards) then, this post could be a bit more interesting for you.

Take into account that Visual Flow in LEX is in beta

The use case it’s simple. I have a Hotel, and I would like to get some feedback from my guests, so I will send them a survey.

The Flow would be very simple, and as the creation is not the main goal here, I will not show it step by step. But if you are new, double check Visual Flow documentation and also TrailHead.

First of all we need to open Flow Designer, so, can I do it in LEX? Yes. Go to Setup and just write “flow” in order to find it and be able to open this platform feature.

As you can see on below image, the Flow Designer looks like the Classic UI one, so you would not need to learn how to work with it if you already used it.

Once I have created my Flow, we can add it to our Home page, but remember to Activate it, otherwise it would not be available in Lightning App Builder.

So, go to Home, Edit this page, and Lightning App Builder will help you to add it there.

How? Really simple, if you go to Standard Apps, one of them is Flow (beta) so you only need to click on it, and your flow will appear in the home page.

But actually I have 2 active flows, so what can I do? When you highlight your custom Flow, on the right side you have the option to select the one you need to show, so just pick one.

I can also say that I had to try a couple of times till I got this behavior. First time, Book Room flow did not appear on the drop down list, so there were not way to add it to my Home page. But remember, this feature is on beta, so be patience and try till you get it.

Last thing to mention is the fact that you can chose between 1 or 2 columns. My first thought was that this attribute would help me to determine if I wanted 2 flows on the same row on the page layout, but it is not related to that. It just help you to set all your flow fields in 2 columns instead of one. For instance, these 2 screens show same fields but they are sorted in a different way.

And how it works? In Spanish we say better a image rather than thousand words but in this case, better a video rather than thousand images.

 

Maybe your last question is if we can add it to any other place? Yes, for instance, I can include it in my Guest record layout

But let’s make up a little bit and define something for every guest:

In order to do that, I had to add a Lookup step in the Flow and use the variable {!recordId} as a filter. So that, I can retrieve Guest object record and use it in my Flow.

It was not easy to find the way to retrieve the recordId but this post helped me a lot.

I hope you liked this short entry about Flow. You can find more information on Salesforce release notes entry.