The point and click way
Yes, you are reading the title correctly. This article explains how you can open your Process Builder processes in the Flow Builder. In this first part I will explain how you can use the existing point-and-click tools to open your Process Builder processes in the Flow Builder
Why?
The obvious question here is: why would you want to do that? Well, I have two reasons:
- Because we (apparently) can and it’s cool 🙂
- To help you debug your Process Builder errors (more on this in part 3 of this blog series)
But before we dive into the details, let me first explain how I got to this and why I find it useful to do this. Actually the credits for this “feature” (or bug / hidden gem / easter egg) go to my colleague Jos Vlaar. He found this feature by accident and I have used it multiple times now to debug Process Builder errors. Any Salesforce admin should recognize this: a Process Builder process runs into an error and then you get that email with the “details”. That email is full of system-generated identifiers like “isChangedDecision16_myRule_15_Deactivate_Account_c”. It’s almost impossible to map this information to the actual Process Builder process and therefore makes debugging your errors more difficult. By opening your processes in Flow Builder, you can find out what is really going on under the hood.
How: The point-and-click way
As it turns out, all you need to use this feature is to have a Custom Field that is referenced in one of your Process Builder processes. So, let’s go ahead and create a custom field on the Account object, in this case a checkbox field (but any custom field will do the trick). I’ll use it to send a Chatter post to log that the record was created or edited.
- Type: Checkbox
- Field Label: Send Post To Chatter
- Field Name: SendPostToChatter
Let’s stop here for a moment. Why do you need a custom field? Well, for custom fields you get an extra button: “Where is this used?” Clicking the button will show you where your custom field is used within the Salesforce org. Standard fields do not have this button (yet?).
Ok, so I’ve got my custom button. If I click the “Where is this used?” button, I see that it currently is only used in the Account page layouts. This makes sense, since I just created the field.
Next, let’s create a Process Builder process to send the Chatter Post based on the checkbox. The first decision node will trigger a “Post to Chatter” action if the record is created AND if the checkbox is checked:
The second decision node will trigger a “Post to Chatter” action if the record is updated AND if the checkbox is checked:
Let’s activate the Process and go back to the “Where is this used?” button on the custom field. If you now press the button, the Process Builder shows up:
As you can see, it’s not listed as a Process Builder, but as a Flow. Now, all you have to do is to click on the Process Builder Process and voila: it opens in Flow Builder:
I can hear you think: “But does this mean I always have to have a reference to a custom field in my Process Builder process in order to open it in Flow Builder?”
No, actually you can open any Process Builder process in Flow Builder, but this is the easiest way since it’s available directly from the Salesforce UI. In part 2 of this blog series I will explain how you can open any process in Flow Builder, the somewhat-more-difficult way. Keep an eye out for it!
