Salesforce – From Process Builder To Lightning Flow – Post to Chatter
Salesforce – From Process Builder To Lightning Flow – Email Alerts
December 9, 2020
Salesforce – From Process Builder To Lightning Flow – Submit for Approval
December 23, 2020
Post to Chatter Introduction
If you've been following this eight-part series on moving from Process Builder to Lightning Flow, you'll find Post to Chatter very similar to last week's Email Alerts. That's one of the important things to understand with this series of lessons; what you're learning here can be used with any type of Lightning Flow you need to create.
Sending an Email Alert introduced you to Flow Actions. For the quick learners, Post to Chatter is also a Flow Action. Just search for Chatter in the Action search and it will show up. For the rest of us, let's walk through the steps.
Process Builder's Post to Chatter
We'll continue with the same use case we've been using where we have a custom field on our Account record called CSAT Rating. When the rating moves to Unsatisfied, we want to create a Chatter post.
To do this in Process Builder we'd:
- Start by clicking the Add Action
- Select the Action Type called Post to Chatter
- Complete the Action Name
- Leave the default setting for Post To This Record
- Finish by adding our Message, complete with a merge field for the Account Name, just for a little extra fun
Post to Chatter using Lightning Flow
Which type of Record-Triggered Flows should we use; the Before or the After? Ask yourself, "does posting a message on Chatter involve a different object than our Account record that triggers this flow?" If you answered yourself "Yes" then you are correct. Chatter Posts are stored in a different object than the Account record, therefore, we need to use the After Record Trigger Flow.
If you've been building these Flows as we've progressed through this series, you will already have your Decision element created. If not, watch the video and I'll show it there.
Let's build out the Post to Chatter Element in our Flow:
- Click on the "+" to add a new Element to the Unsatisfied path.
- Select the Action Element
- In the Action field, start typing Chatter and you'll see a Post to Chatter action appear. Select that Action.
- Just like Process Builder, we need to give the Action a name. Flow calls this a Label.
- We're going to cheat a bit on this next part. We're going simply type the text of our Chatter Post into the Message field.
- The most appropriate method would be to add a New Resource called a Text Template. You add the Message Text there. This also makes is easier to add merge fields. Then instead of typing our text into the Message field, we simply reference our Text Template. Try it out, as it really is the better way to do this.
- Again, just like Process Builder, we need to identify the record we're associating our Post to. We'll use, our good friend, $Record.Id for the Target Name or ID field.
- Press Done and you've completed the Post to Chatter exercise.
Conclusion
Hope you found this helpful. Don't forget to watch me build this on the YouTube video and download the cheatsheet. I greatly appreciate you subscribing to both this blog site as well as my YouTube channel. I try to keep the helpful tips flowing.
Next week will be the final post in this series and we'll be looking at Approval Processes. Not my favorite topic but it's an important one.
