Winter ’21 Flow Enhancements

Winter ’21 pre-release org is ready. And without any surprise, Winter ’21 is also bringing lots of great enhancements. In this post, I am going to focus on a few Flow Enhancements that we will be getting soon and will be able to take advantage of. 

With Winter ’21, we will be able to trigger a flow when the record is getting deleted. This is similar to Delete context from Trigger. To me, this is a great enhancement. Few things to note, you can. only do Before the record is deleted, not after the record is deleted. And if the deleted record is recovered later, that will not rollback any changes/actions performed as part of the flow. To handle that situation, the recommended approach is to write Apex after undelete trigger.

With this release, you will be presented with the option of selecting either a Freeform or Autolayout option. Autolayout is in Beta stage right now. But if you select Autolayout, you basically keep adding components by clicking on + sign. No need to organize and dragging here and there to make the flow look good, keep the connector line straight, etc. If you are like me, who likes to see things organized, I am sure you will like this feature as well.

If you feel frustrated with the complaint that flow is not working for a specific user and you are not able to debug that, then Winter ’21 is bringing the option with which you can debug flow as any specific user. 

Now you can decide when to trigger the flow like trigger the flow every time or only when specific condition(s) are satisfied. I think this will be super helpful to make sure the process runs fast and we can now avoid unnecessary execution of the flow, which will improve the execution time.

This feature will be in pilot mode. Winter ’21 brings a new Section component which will allow us to arrange components in multiple columns.

Now when a flow will be triggered due to record update, we can decide multiple paths based on what value in the record is updated. This feature allows you to filter out record updates that are not relevant to your use case and to avoid reprocessing records that previously triggered the flow.

For example in the below sample flow based on whether the account is active or not I have configured multiple actions.

With this release, it will be easier to find out the flow builder error. The moment you will try to save the flow, if there is any error, that will be presented with a link and clicking o the link, it will directly take you to the component which is throwing the error. Very impressive enhancement.

With Autolaunched flows with trigger, no need to create Get Records elements to fetch associated records. You can simply refer them using $Record. Below is the example where I am accessing Account’s isActive check.

These are my favorite Flow Enhancements from Winter ’21 release. I highly recommend two things –