Alex Colburn – June 9, 2021
The Developers Speak is a video series featuring certified Salesforce consultants at Digital Mass. They come to you twice a month to help bridge the gap between business problems and technical solutions.
On this episode, Andrew is back to talk about updates to Salesforce Flows that are coming in the Summer 21 release.
Andrew here with Digital Mass back to talk more about how Summer 21 is going to bring some awesome features to your production org on June 11th and 12th.
Today we're going to be covering another really cool feature, one that I'm particularly passionate about, which is Salesforce flows. A couple of the features that are most exciting with flows in summer 21 are multi-column support for your flow screens. So this isn't relevant for your auto-launch flows or anything that you might use in a before or after safe context, but it's really helpful for those guided workflows that you're pushing users through or for those button clicks, which generate multi-record steps or multi-screen step flows. Those screen interfaces can now be configured to have anywhere from one to four columns in each of the screens wherever you want. To be clear, you can have three columns and one section of the screen and four in another, you can really have as much flexibility as you want with this gives you a ton of additional utility in terms of configuration to define the forms that are, that make the most sense for your particular use case. You can do things like conditionally hide columns in the inflows, you can stack elements within a particular column, and really create interfaces that mirror your record UIs and take advantage of standard or custom componentry that you're implementing for your flow handiwork as well.
Another quick feature that's coming to flows with summer 21 is the ability to sort collections of records with just a new element that you're going to see on your record UI. So that's right, there's a new collection sort element that you should be seeing on your close screens. You can drag onto the interface and it'll just connect it with any other step in your flow that is passing in what is called a collection of variables, basically a list of records of some type, and you can now auto-sort that with any criteria, multi multi-tiered criteria that you want in ascending or descending order at each step. So you really get incredible flexibility with sorting and some additional sort of added sweetness to this feature is that you can also trim that set. If you're doing things like generating a top five list of records, you can do that very easily after performing your sort blast added detail with a flow is that you now have the ability to set default values and requirements for record choice elements. This applies to your radio buttons, your pick lists, your checkboxes, and multi-select checkboxes. You'll be able to say that this picklist should default to value X or Y and should be required on the interface.
That's all we're going to talk about the data. We'll be able to talk about some developer-friendly features tomorrow, like lightning web component quick actions, which are being implemented as part of the summer 21 release.
Meet the developer:
Meet Andrew Davis: Andrew joined the Digital Mass team as a Senior Salesforce Developer in August 2020. He came in with a few certifications on his belt and hasn't slowed down since. Andrew currently holds Platform Developer 1, Platform Developer 2, Certified Administrator, Platform App Builder, Marketing Cloud Email Specialist, Marketing Cloud Developer, and the Javascript Developer certifications.
Outside of work, Andrew likes to spend his time playing D&D, camping, and burying himself in Youtube playlists exploring things ranging from emerging technologies to how to hand-sew your own socks - it’s pretty obvious he fits right in with the DM crew!